Continued Decline of World’s Glaciers

It’s not news that many of the world’s glaciers have been shrinking for years, probably as a result of global warming. But the situation got notably worse this summer, as the deadly European heat wave also took its toll on mountains and glaciers.

France’s Mont Blanc, which typically boasts as many as 150 climbers each day in the summer, was forced to bar climbers and trekkers after two people died in a rockslide at the beginning of August.

It’s believed more than 10,000 people died as a result of France’s summer heatwave, and the unprecedented heat also caused the permafrost on Mont Blanc to melt at an abnormally fast rate. The melting permafrost in turn caused the ice holding rocky portions of the mountain together to shrink, resulting in rockslides all over Mont Blanc.

But while Mont Blanc may have been the most extreme case, it certainly wasn’t the only one. One of the world’s most famous mountains, the Matterhorn in the Alps, also experienced devastating rockfalls, again probably due to the massive heatwave. In July, 90 climbers had to be evacuated after a chunk of the northeast ridge of the mountain broke loose, sending hundreds of cubic yards of rock hurtling down to cover the trail. Officials closed the mountain to climbers for three days, saying that it was the largest rockslide to occur there in a century.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Under-reported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.