Europe’s Mightiest Glaciers Are Melting
https://eos.org/articles/europes-mightiest-glaciers-are-melting
Source: By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: When the photographer Walter Mittelholzer snapped pictures of Mont Blanc from his plane in 1919, he pointed his lens at the landscape’s rugged beauty. One century later, his images reveal the rapid loss of ice on the Alps’ highest peak. This summer, researchers re-created Mittelholzer’s images of three Mont Blanc glaciers by photographing the glaciers 100 years later. The scientists triangulated Mittelholzer’s original location on the basis of nearby peaks and flew a helicopter to an elevation of 4,700 meters at the same spot near the Mont Blanc summit, which straddles the border of Italy and France. Viewed side by side, the images show the drastic effect of climate change on the region. The scientists chose three of the mountain’s largest glaciers: Argentière, Bossons, and Mer de Glace. In the photographs taken at Mer de Glace, the black-and-white image from 1919 shows a channel of ice nearly 2 kilometers wide in places flowing down a deep valley. In 2019, the glacier is sunken, covered in brown sediment, and peters out into a melt pond at what used to be the glacier’s far end. ...“The ice loss visible in these pictures is representative of the type of melt that is happening to the vast majority of glaciers across the Alps and in other glaciated regions around the world,” Baxter told Eos.... [Dramatic photos in article]
Source: By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: When the photographer Walter Mittelholzer snapped pictures of Mont Blanc from his plane in 1919, he pointed his lens at the landscape’s rugged beauty. One century later, his images reveal the rapid loss of ice on the Alps’ highest peak. This summer, researchers re-created Mittelholzer’s images of three Mont Blanc glaciers by photographing the glaciers 100 years later. The scientists triangulated Mittelholzer’s original location on the basis of nearby peaks and flew a helicopter to an elevation of 4,700 meters at the same spot near the Mont Blanc summit, which straddles the border of Italy and France. Viewed side by side, the images show the drastic effect of climate change on the region. The scientists chose three of the mountain’s largest glaciers: Argentière, Bossons, and Mer de Glace. In the photographs taken at Mer de Glace, the black-and-white image from 1919 shows a channel of ice nearly 2 kilometers wide in places flowing down a deep valley. In 2019, the glacier is sunken, covered in brown sediment, and peters out into a melt pond at what used to be the glacier’s far end. ...“The ice loss visible in these pictures is representative of the type of melt that is happening to the vast majority of glaciers across the Alps and in other glaciated regions around the world,” Baxter told Eos.... [Dramatic photos in article]