| inbluevt | Date: Sunday, 2013/04/28, 12:53 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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In the 1990s, the first cracks began to appear in the mighty tongue of the Trift Glacier in the central Swiss canton of Bern. In 2002, the peak of the ice mass burst into thousands of pieces. Since it lay in a
hollow, the water swelled into a lake rather than flowing out. The Trift Lake then became an attraction: Hundreds of tourists per day now visit the suspension bridge that hangs over this new body of water.
“Many more people come to the glacier than before,” says Wilfried Haeberli of Zürich University.
The geographer and his colleagues calculate that, in the coming years, hundreds of such lakes will come into being in the Swiss Alps alone. In Austria, the Andes and other mountainous regions heavily affected by climate change, similar dramatic environmental transformations are occuring. “The rapid melting of glaciers is radically changing the Alpine landscape,” Haeberli reported at the annual meeting of the
European Geosciences Union (EGU) inVienna. The ice region is in many places becoming a landscape of lakes.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Sunday, 2013/04/28, 12:55 PM |
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