Why melting glaciers should matter to you

For every five of you reading this one of you will be directly impacted by melting glaciers and ice sheets. Indirectly, we could all be affected.

It’s a pretty scary thought. You could be forced out of your home, face water shortages and power outages, and pay more for the food you put on your table.

In a report published last weekExternal link by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists warned that glaciers and ice sheets are losing mass at a greater rate than previously forecast and this is still accelerating, contributing to sea-level rise. 

Keystone / Anthony Anex

The people who could be forced to move and radically alter their way of life are the 1.4 billion who either live in high mountain regions, low-lying coastal zones, the Arctic or in small island states. Are you among them? 

If you live near a coast, you could witness the water level to rise by more than a metre by the end of the century, swamping your home, as the great polar ice sheets shrink and oceans expand due to warming. 

If you live in a mountain region, your town or village could be threatened by an increase in rockfalls, landslides, avalanches and flooding. My colleague, Luigi Jorio, has produced an excellent story exploring these risks in detail, as part of his series looking at glaciers in the Swiss Alps. 

If you live downstream – and this is why it matters to everyone – glacier loss will result in less water flowing into our rivers and lakes that we rely on for drinking, power generation, and irrigation. Luigi’s next report will investigate how severe these problems could be. 

I’d like to highlight a story we wrote in mid-September about how global warming is eliminating the Alps’ mightiest glacier, the Aletsch. Researchers in Zurich used a 3D model to forecast the speed of its retreat in the coming decades. I highly recommend reading the story and watching the short video simulation included in the article that illustrates this great glacier’s rapid retreat. 

This summer I made the acquaintance of an alpinist living in the resort town of Grindelwald. Besides being a talented climber, Dan Moore is a sharp-eyed observer of the dramatic changes taking place in the Swiss Alps, often seeing what others don’t, providing unexpected insights and reflecting on the beauty that could be lost forever. In the first of a short series of articles he’ll write for swissinfo.ch, Dan tells us about his encounter with glacier-surfing turtles. It’s worth a few minutes of your time to read. 

Is your community already experiencing the impact of climate change? You can write me. [e-mail]