so high they tear clouds apart, the tractor-size groomer backs over a 40-foot-tall mound of compacted snow, unrolling a bolt of white fabric. On top of the mound, six workers are stitching fabric panels together with a handheld, heavy-duty sewing machine. It’s June at Kitzsteinhorn in Austria, one of the highest and coldest ski areas in the Alps, and meltwater is gushing into ravines on the flanks of the mountain.
“With the warming climate, everything has changed,” Brennsteiner says. He started working here 31 years ago, during what now seem like the glory years of Alpine skiing. To save themselves, the people of the Alps are going to dramatic lengths. An estimated 100,000 snowmaking machines now power the Alpine ski industry, enough to blanket an area the size of New York City within hours. Beyond snow depots like Kitzsteinhorn’s, desperate locals are swaddling the ice on a few of the Alps’ roughly 4,000 glaciers, to try to delay the rapid melt caused by global warming.
When food was scarce—and it generally was—children from the poorest pockets of the Alps were forced to trek to lowland markets, where they sold themselves into seasonal bondage as farmworkers, typically from March to October. “A barely concealed slave market,” the Cincinnatiwrote in 1908, describing one such market in Friedrichshafen, in southern Germany. It reported as many as 400 boys and girls up for barter, some as young as six, “as if they were a lot of calves or chickens.
Many locals still see themselves as down-to-earth farmers who love their valley. Wolf’s son Hannes and 26-year-old grandson, Christoph, introduce me to their cattle—Hermann, Kathi, Gitta, and Lilly—as the four munch fragrant hay on some of the Alps’ most expensive real estate. The family would never think of getting rid of them. “It’s heritage and duty,” Wolf says.
Lejeune’s data prove that they weren’t. He points to a graph comparing the snow depth at Col de Porte in the past 30-year period with the previous one. The line plunges downward, showing an average snow-cover decrease of 15 inches. “That’s a lot,” Lejeune says. “That’s really a lot.” Where tourists now walk on a suspension bridge, several hundred feet above a meltwater torrent, they used to walk across ice on the snout of Switzerland’s Trift Glacier. The lake didn’t exist before this century; the bridge was first built in 2004. A power company plans to put a dam here.like Kitzsteinhorn, it’s hard to grasp how tiny snowflakes could have formed such an immense mass of ice.
I have seen it. Town people from a small sweedish town were covering glaciers with white cloth to prevent the evaporation. I predict global wide water scarcity and famine by 2050.
Climate Change
We need to restore the small water cycle, regenerate soil health, increase vegetation, & humidity then hope the rest of the world follows.
This aerial photography looks very good,
I love Drones ! 3 🙃
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