“When the snow started coming over and it got dark / harder to breath, I was bricking it and thought I might die,” Shimmin wrote an Instagram post. Shimmin and his group survived, although one member was sent to the hospital.
The avalanche was the second glacier collapse of the week, demonstrating the perils of human-caused climate change amid a blistering hot summer in parts of Europe and Asia.
On July 3, a glacier chunk as large as an apartment building detached in Italy’s Dolomites region and killed at least 11 hikers. The block separated from a melting glacier on Marmolada mountain and triggered an avalanche of ice, rock and debris below, where many tourists hike during the summer.
The avalanche in Italy occurred in a record-breaking heat wave during the country’s worst drought in 70 years, which was caused partly by a lack of winter snow in the mountains.
The footage of the large ice avalanche in Marmolada today in close proximity.
We don’t know the author, we will write it in the comments as soon as we will know it.
Indeed an impressive sequence pic.twitter.com/zDo4q40qOP
— Alpine-Adriatic Meteorological Society (@aametsoc) July 3, 2022
Researchers say these events underline the dangers of a rapidly warming world and are expected to increase unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed.
Rising global temperatures are slowly weakening glacier systems in mountainous areas, where millions of people rely on these reservoirs as a source of freshwater. Climate change is also inducing more extreme heat waves, which can push the weakening glacier systems over the edge.
“There’s no other directions glaciers are going other than retreating” as global warming increases, said Peter Neff, a glaciologist at the University of Minnesota. “The feeling from the event in Italy and [Kyrgyzstan] is this is coming more often.”
The glacial events in Italy and Kyrgyzstan have similar backbones, glaciologist Jeff Kargel said. In the days before the collapse on the Tian Shan mountains, temperatures hit as high as 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 Celsius) at nearly 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) high. Similarly, temperatures soared about 50 degrees in the days leading to Italy’s fatal glacier accident. Both are samples of heat waves that have plagued the Northern Hemisphere in recent months, some of which have been found to be more intense and frequent because of climate change.
Both were also glacier ice avalanches, rather than primarily snow, in which a glacier broke off and collapsed under the force gravity. The high density of ice added speed and weight to the avalanche.
In the Tian Shan event, Neff pointed out that there was no apparent snow around the mountain so the avalanche was largely a solid chunk of glacial ice. In high mountain regions with permafrost, warm temperatures not only destabilize the glacier ice but also the density of the ice around it. “It’s very dense, more like a landslide than an avalanche,” he said.
“The British trekker is indeed, as he is aware, very lucky to be alive in the case of the Kyrgyzstan event,” added Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.
Kargel said ice and snow detachments occur every spring and summer as the glaciers approach the peak of their melt season, building up mass throughout the winter and gently flow down a valley. Often chunks of the glacier become unstable, break off and produce ice…
Read More: Video: Glacier avalanches in Italy, Kyrgyzstan highlight warming climate
