"Alpine climbing routes crumble as climate crisis continues"

Clare

Thru Hiker
These pictures are devastating. Especially the picture of sheets draped over the glacier, which looks (but what do I know) particularly futile and tragic. Combined with current events and policies in the amazon.
 

tom

Thru Hiker
Yeah its bad... The Eiger northface is falling appart - the ice was the glue that held it together... I know of at least one alpine hut that needed additional foundations a few years ago as the centuries old structure was build on rocks held by ice. And there are dozens of huts (e.g. most of the Brenta huts) that rely on glaciers for their entire water supply... The fallout is everywhere and walking on the exposed old "blue" glacial ice just breaks my heart...
 
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Bob-W

Trail Blazer
I did most of my Alpine climbing in the 1980s and even then things were, shall we say, dynamic. Having whole mountains shake with rockfall was enlightening to say the least for someone on their first trip to the Alps (Mt Blanc region). The Eiger north face has been autumn/winter/spring only for around 25 years now purely because of rockfall, it's one of those faces that varies massively in how "icy" it appears from the meadows below.

It would have been nice to see historical photos, even from the 1980s, for comparison in the linked article.
 

Enzo

Thru Hiker
Given they are finding bits of litter exposed presumably these are not unpresidented low levels?
Not a subject i know anything about, but that's where the pics lead me.
 

Bob-W

Trail Blazer
Glaciers are "rivers of ice", stuff that gets dropped in "upstream" eventually appears lower down. Lots of incidences of planes, bodies, etc. disappearing then appearing fifty or a hundred years later.
 

Bmblbzzz

Thru Hiker
Or even a couple of thousand years later, as with "Otzi" the ice man.

Actually, I'm not sure if he was found in a glacier or just melted snow cover, thinking about it.
 

Ian Barton

Summit Camper
I first went to Chamonix in about 1976. We went back about five years ago and went up to the Mer de Glace. There is a series of signs as you climb down onto the glacier which the level in past years. The glacier had dropped around 200ft in that time.
 
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Ian Barton

Summit Camper
Glaciers are "rivers of ice", stuff that gets dropped in "upstream" eventually appears lower down. Lots of incidences of planes, bodies, etc. disappearing then appearing fifty or a hundred years later.
In the last few years the bodies two people I knew who "disappeared" in the 1980's on the Vallee Blanche and at the foot of the Brenva Face have been found.
 

BlueTrain

Trail Blazer
A former colleague of my wife disappeared on Denali around 30 years ago. In a twist, we found out about it when reading an article about his mother. She was a grief counselor.
 
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