Austrian glaciers receded last year at a rapid pace, so much so that the Alpine country is likely to be largely ice-free in 40 to 45 years as the process continues, experts said Friday. The Austrian Alpine Club said that, of the 93 glaciers its volunteers measured and observed, all but one receded in 2022-2023. The 79 glaciers measured both last year and the previous year were an average 78 feet shorter than a year earlier, it said in an annual report. That was the third-highest figure of shrinkage in both the club's 133 years of measurements and in the past seven years, per the AP. The retreat of 14 other glaciers was observed less precisely, for example by comparing photos.
The biggest retreat was that of Austria's biggest glacier—the Pasterze, in the Glockner mountain group in the southern province of Carinthia—which shrank by 668 feet, a record for that glacier. Gerhard Lieb, the co-leader of the club's glacier measurement service, said Austria's glaciers can no longer be saved and their disappearance in the coming decades is "unstoppable." The process of forming snow reserves at the upper ends of glaciers so that they can stabilize takes decades, "and the time is up," he added.
"There might be some remnants in shadowed locations—maybe at the Glockner glacier on the northeast side, some areas in the Oetztal valley," said the service's other co-leader, Andreas Kellerer-Pirklbauer. "But de facto, in 40 to 45 years all of Austria will be pretty much ice-free." The experts work at the University of Graz's geography institute. Last year's average figure for glacier retreat fell short of the record set in 2021-2022 of 94.2 feet. But no one glacier receded by more than 328 feet that year, and two did in the latest report: Alongside the Pasterze, Tyrol province's Rettenbachferner glacier was 416.7 feet shorter. Only one glacier, the Baerenkopfkees in the Glockner group, was unchanged in length last year.
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