It’s spring in southern Chile, and among the conifers and the morning song of the birds you can hear the sound of global warming. When the ice bursts, it sometimes sounds like gun shots. At other times, it roars like a thunderstorm, while the heavy blocks of ice break off and fall to the surface of the water.
The deep blue color comes from the very bottom layers of the ice. That this part of the ice now comes to the surface shows that the glacier foundation is in quick resolution.
A huge stretch of the east side of the glacier is broken off during the night, and the remains of the over 200-meter-long, 20-meter-wide and 200-meter-high piece now floats around in the bay. The size is hard to grasp. They rise like three-story houses, and only the 10 percent line up over the water. Just 30 years ago, the glacier covered this entire bay. Now it has moved two kilometers back.
In September, the UN Climate Panel, IPCC, released the largest report on the world's water and ice areas to date. The chapter on glaciers shows that what is seen here at the Gray Glacier is happening across the globe. The disappearing happens most rapidly in Greenland, but also in the Antarctic, the Himalayas and all other mountain areas covered in ice are now in danger.
A mountain side partly covered in snow at the Torres del Paine national park.
On the surface of the glacier small ponds and lakes care now found. Such phenomena did also exist years ago, but not at all to the same extent. The water takes more heat from than the sun and is thereby melting even more ice, that eventually creates tunnels into the glacier making the glaciers even more fragile.
The surface of the glacier.
A piece of clean and clear ice is washed up on the shore.
The surface of the glacier.
"The global oceans and the cryosphere have been hit by global warming for decades," said Ko Barrett, vice president of the UN Climate Panel. “It is serious because it not only causes the world seas to rise, it also fundamentally changes conditions in the areas where the ice disappears”, she explains and made it clear what is at stake now: "What is at stake is ecosystems, wildlife and, not least, the world we leave to our children."
The glaciers of the earth are melting at an alarming rate. The Gray Glacier in southern Chile is one of the front lines of the climate crisis.
Like an 850 meter wide defensive wall, the eastern facade of the ice rises up to twenty meters above the surface of the water, and below the surface it extends 300 meters into the cold water. In 30 years, the Gray Glacier Wall has moved two kilometers backwards.
At the same time, it has become significantly thinner. And it only goes faster and faster. In 2018, a UN report found that 95 percent of Chile’s glaciers are in the process of retreating due to the man-made global warming.
