Global warming in the mountains

People often say that GW is slow and hard to see. One place you can see it is in the mountains. I don't have many pix that show it well, but here's one pair. We're looking at the Sulzenauferner. The first is from 2014, and is taken from the path up to the Beiljoch (which said col is visible in the lower pair of pix) between the Sulzenauhutte and the Dresdener. The Zuckerhutl is straight on, buried in cloud, how unusual.

DSC_4578

And here's the same thing back in 2001, though taken from a slightly different and higher viewpoint, somewhere around the Trogler. The triangular buttress almost dead center, above, has only its right hand side visible.

Dscn3441-icedfall

Unfortunately back in 2001 I took no great pains to make a pic I could compare against later. My map, which dates originally from 1970 but had the ice revised in 1995, shows the area as one continuous glacier with no rock.

Browsing the web, here's one from 1980:

sulzenauferner-1980

Wiki has one from 1998; and from 2003.

Here's another view of the same, taken looking the other way from about the moraine on the far left edge of the top pic; the lack of snow in the first pic of the pair makes the difference even starker. Again, top is 2014.

DSC_4467

And then 2001:

Dscn3434-moraines

* glacierchange.wordpress.com

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I was in Innsbruck in August 2012 and was astonished at how little snow was on the glaciers - ice right up to the bergschrund and little or no accumulation on many. Usual caveats of dangers of personal anecdotes and single years apply - incidentally when I looked it up later it turned out to have been a record breaking year

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/unprecedented-snow-me…

French IGN maps show current and 1980 glacier extent. The difference is striking.

By verytallguy (not verified) on 03 Nov 2014 #permalink

William, I know you just wanted to show off your skills at taking great pictures (yours are at least as fine as those of Jules and James), but no mentioning of Mauri Pelto's blog? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
https://glacierchange.wordpress.com/

[Thanks; I'll add that one to the list -W]

And then there's the Swiss glacier site ... whose list can easily be interpreted to show that glaciers are advancing ... just look at the blue triangles and ignore the orange ones. :-)

By John Mashey (not verified) on 04 Nov 2014 #permalink

And them blue triangles do alot of hopping around among them rows between different years, so a lot of them swiss claciers did advance at least in one year during the last decades!
Checkmate, alarmists!

By wereatheist (not verified) on 04 Nov 2014 #permalink

I worked in Glacier National Park as a tour guide from the summer of 2003 until 2008. In that time, Jackson Glacier, which is easily visible from the east side of Logan Pass on Going-to-the-Sun Road visibly retreated. The NPS of course is documenting it and reports the same thing.

Of course, this doesn't prove that climate change is anthropogenic (though I believe that it is) but there are plenty of deniers out there who don't even acknowledge that the earth is warming...

Climate change is a slow motion train wreck but even more devastating in that it will affect us all. These smaller glaciers are going fast but are not affecting sea level much because they are not big enough but Greenland and West Antarctica are starting to melt and they can each add seven metres to sea level rise. http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/blog/catastrophic-collapse-of-ice-she…

By Bob Bingham (not verified) on 04 Nov 2014 #permalink

Less snow everywhere, higher temperatures, problems with stranger winters and so on. More than that, our bodies do not adapt so quickly to the climate changes. It is not the first climate change in the history (warming or cooling), but it still is shocking to see how it happens. If you're interested in this subject, you can read more about the global warming here: http://www.arctic-warming.com/?page_id=46.

[I'd recommend you don't reference junkscience. Its a bit of a giveaway -W]

By Dave Lowry (not verified) on 07 Nov 2014 #permalink

William, since you worked at BAS, the site Dave Lowry (likely a fake name) promotes is worth a look, if only to have a laugh.

BTW, why does this guy even have a wikipedia entry?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnd_Bernaerts

[As to the latter, because "User:Gerhard123Schindler" could be bothered to create the page. Arnd does seem to be a bit of a nutter, fortunately an obscure one -W]