Reply #3: Shrinking Alpine glacier points to snowless future

[lovuian]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=57633bd3d588b7d5&cat=89d96798a39564bd

ON THE ALETSCH GLACIER, Switzerland (AP) -- It's cold in the snow up at 6,500 feet, even with sunshine pouring down from almost cloudless skies.

Skiers schuss their way down for well-earned lunches and there's a smile on almost every face in this winter wonderland.

Yet looking over the colossal sweep of the Aletsch glacier, a remnant of the last Ice Age snaking down through a deep valley below the peaks of the Bernese Oberland, the picture appears far different -- and warmer.

The river of ice has retreated 2.1 miles since peaking at a length of 14 miles in 1860, estimates Hanspeter Holzhauser, a geographer at the University of Zurich who studies the Aletsch glacier region. Not quite half of the shrinkage has happened just since 1950.

A bare expanse of jumbled rocks and boulders stretches where the tongue of ice mass used to be. And the glacier will shrink more -- even if temperatures should stay at current levels -- because the warming of the last few decades has yet to take full effect, Holzhauser said.

The Aletsch was once seen as a threat, adding ice and threatening to encroach on inhabited areas. A large wooden cross testifies to villagers who gave thanks their homes were spared. These days, the glacier is more of a threat from its melting ice worsening valley floods.

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Flooding who'd guess!!!