The melting warning: Glacier disasters signal an urgent climate reckoning

Planet Earth is increasingly prodding humanity with wake-up calls to urgently tackle the issue of global warming and climate change. The latest such call has come from one of the unlikeliest places - Heidi's home country, Switzerland -where a glacial burst has utterly destroyed Blatten, a village that had stood at that spot for centuries.

Fortunately for its 300 residents, scientists had been monitoring the Nesthorn mountain above Blatten and were alerted as to the possibility that the Birch glacier it held might burst and topple, endangering the village, and ensured timely evacuation. Needless to say, the reason villages like Blatten are where they are is precisely because they are not seen to be in the path of danger. But over the last 20 years, there has been a fundamental change.

The glaciers, and the permafrost, are melting faster than ever. Melting of permafrost, which acts as glue to snow on mountains, destabilizes the terrain, causing destructive landslides and avalanches. The reality that the latest Alpine disaster is not one of its kind, with a number of disasters of lesser magnitude taking place in that mountain range, almost all of them linked to global warming, is a dire indication of more such disasters to come if alleviating steps are not urgently taken.

Scientists have observed that the volume of ice is less in the Alps by half than what it was a century ago, and some glaciers have disappeared altogether. But the Alps are not the only mountains to experience the phenomenon of glaciers melting, or disasters due to this. The Himalayas are being subjected to similar diminution of permafrost and glaciers, leading to a number of avalanche-type disasters.

One recalls with a sense of trepidation the catastrophic floods in Uttarakhand, from the horrific disaster caused by a collapsing glacier in the Kedarnath valley in June 2013, to that which occurred in February 2021, underscoring the devastating impact of climate change. Glaciers are often referred to as the 'water towers' of the world, with half of humanity depending on mountains for their water needs.

The Tibetan Plateau alone is the source of many of Asia's biggest rivers and provides water to 1.35 billion people, or 20 per cent of the world's population. Thus, glacial melting and disappearance will bode ill for water security for humanity. Another hazard pointed out by scientists is that mountain glaciers lock up enough water to raise global sea levels by 32 cm if they melted entirely, posing unimaginable disaster for marine life as well as low-lying coastal areas and islands. But, so far, humanity appears to have lent a deaf ear to the all too many wake-up calls and is destined to suffer the consequences!