Mountaintop Alpine Glaciers

     As you drive north thru Italy toward the Rechen Pass and the Austrian border, the mountains get bigger, taller, more imposing. Evergreen forests cover both sides of the valleys as you wind your way up, broken only by emerald green pastures and winter-time ski slopes. The closer you get to Austria and the higher the elevation, the sparser the vegetation gets. Each mountain is topped with gray-brown rock set above the stark line where the trees abruptly end. In between there are gray-tan rock fields, cascading down toward the tree line. You can see the different eco-systems change with the naked eye as the elevation quickly changes.



     There are only a few of the higher peaks that have snow on them this late in the Summer. With the trained eye, you can see where the older glaciers used to be on some of the mountains without snow. A few decades ago, many of the higher peaks had snow and glaciers year round, but that number has dwindled to what remains in the present day. The atmosphere is warming, there is no doubt. All you have to do is compare pictures from fifty years ago with today to see that mountains like Kilimanjaro, the peaks in Glacier National Park and here in the Tirol region of southwestern Austria and Northern Italy.

     These are the photos I took yesterday, just south of the town of Rechen, Italy. I am working to find the peak names, so give me some time. Once I figure them out, i will be able to do a comparison of then and now. You can see the mountains without snow have some sort of vegetation almost to the peak, while others look strangely bare between the rock fields and the bare granite of the mountain tops. I couldn't help but wonder if those mountains once had year round snow and soon would grow lichens and small grasses as the climate warms and the snows continue to melt.

This is all pure speculation on my part. I don't know very much about this area. But after talking to a few locals in the city of Meran and Dorf Tirol where we stayed, the mountains used to have snow. Now they don't, except for the higher peaks, where a few still have glaciers.

As the Earth warms and sea levels continue to rise, these glaciers will continue to melt. Since 1% of the worlds water is drinkable, and most of that can be found in the Polar Caps, underground aquifers and glacial melt, the disappearance of these glaciers poses a threat to the fresh water supply in all areas. Peaks like the one above could soon look like the one below, and water shortages could become prevalent.