SWITZERLAND

Swiss hold high-altitude wake for lost Alpine glacier

Issued on: 22/09/2019 - 14:10

Denis Bailbouse, REUTERS | People look at the Pizol glacier as they take part in a mourning ceremony as awareness to climate change, Switzerland, September 22, 2019.

Text by: NEWS WIRES

Dozens of people dressed in black went on a “funeral march” up a steep Swiss mountainside on Sunday to mark the disappearance of an Alpine glacier amid growing global alarm over climate change.

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The Pizol “has lost so much substance that from a scientific perspective it is no longer a glacier,” Alessandra Degiacomi, of the Swiss Association for Climate Protection, told AFP ahead of the event.

Sunday’s climb took place as the UN gathered youth activists and world leaders in New York to mull the action needed to curb global warming.

The solemn two-hour “funeral march” led up the side of Pizol mountain in northeastern Switzerland to the foot of the steep and rapidly melting ice formation, situated at an altitude of around 2,700 metres (8,850 feet) near the Liechtenstein and Austrian borders.

Upon arrival, a chaplain and several scientists were to give sombre speeches in remembrance of the glacier, accompanied by the mournful tones of alphorns a 3.6-metre (12-foot), pipe-shaped wooden instrument.

A wreath will be laid for the Pizol glacier, which has been one of the most studied glaciers in the Alps.

The move comes after Iceland made global headlines last month with a large ceremony and the laying of a bronze plaque to commemorate Okjokull, the island’s first glacier lost to climate change.

500 glaciers gone

But unlike Iceland, Sunday’s ceremony does not mark the first disappearance of a glacier from the Swiss Alps.

“Since 1850, we estimate that more than 500 Swiss glaciers have completely disappeared, including 50 that were named,” Swiss glaciologist and march participant Matthias Huss told AFP before the event.

Pizol may not be the first glacier to vanish in Switzerland, but “you could say it is the first to disappear that has been very thoroughly studied,” Huss of the ETH technical university in Zurich said.

The logs kept since scientists began tracking the glacier in 1893 paint a bleak picture of recent rapid changes to the climate.

Pizol has lost 80-90 percent of its volume just since 2006, leaving behind a mere 26,000 square metres (280,000 square feet) of ice, or “less than four football fields,” Huss said.

Pizol, which sits at a relatively low altitude, was never very big.

According to Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, or GLAMOS, it, like nearly 80 percent of Swiss glaciers, has been considered a so-called glacieret.

(AFP)