Comment At around 14:45 on Friday, British tourist Harry Shimmin reached the highest point of his trek along the Jukku Pass in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan. He broke away from the group to take pictures from the edge of a cliff when he heard deep ice crunching behind him. He turned into an avalanche of glacial ice and snow rushing towards him and within minutes he was in a blizzard. “When the snow started to come and it got dark / I couldn’t breathe I was bricked and I thought I might die,” Shimmin wrote in an Instagram post. Shimmin and his team survived, although one member was sent to the hospital. A group of hikers were unharmed when an avalanche hit the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan on June 8, 2022. (Video: Harry Shimmin via ViralHog) The avalanche was the second glacier collapse of the week, demonstrating the dangers of human-induced climate change in the midst of a hot summer in parts of Europe and Asia. On July 3, a chunk of glacier the size of an apartment building broke off in Italy’s Dolomites region, killing at least 11 hikers. The block was split by a melting glacier on Marmolada Mountain and caused an avalanche of ice, rock and debris below, where many tourists hike during the summer. The avalanche in Italy came in a record-breaking heat wave during the country’s worst drought in 70 years, caused in part by a lack of snow in the mountains. Close up footage of the large ice avalanche at Marmolada today. We don’t know the author, we will write it in the comments as soon as we know it. An impressive series indeed pic.twitter.com/zDo4q40qOP — Alpine-Adriatic Meteorological Society (@aametsoc) July 3, 2022 Researchers say these events highlight the dangers of a rapidly warming world and are expected to increase if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed. Rising global temperatures are slowly weakening glacier systems in mountainous regions where millions of people rely on these reservoirs as a source of fresh water. Climate change is also causing more extreme heat waves, which can push weakened glacier systems over the edge. “There are no other directions for glaciers to go but retreat” as global warming increases, said Peter Neff, a glaciologist at the University of Minnesota. “The feeling from the event in Italy and [Kyrgyzstan] this comes more often.” The glaciation events in Italy and Kyrgyzstan have a similar backbone, glaciologist Jeff Kargel said. In the days before the collapse in the Tian Shan mountains, temperatures reached 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 Celsius) at an altitude of nearly 12,000 feet (3,600 meters). Similarly, temperatures soared to around 50 degrees in the days leading up to the fatal accident on Italy’s glacier. Both are examples of heatwaves that have plagued the northern hemisphere in recent months, some of which have been found to be more intense and frequent due to climate change. Both were also glacial avalanches, rather than mostly snow, in which a glacier broke off and collapsed under the force of gravity. The high density of the ice added speed and weight to the avalanche. In the Tian Shan event, Neff pointed out that there was no visible snow around the mountain, so the avalanche was largely a solid piece of glacial ice. In high mountain areas 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 knows, very lucky to be alive in the case of Kyrgyzstan,” added Kargel, a senior scientist at the Institute of Planetary Science. Kargel said ice and snow meltdowns occur each spring and summer as glaciers near the peak of their melting season, building up mass over the winter and gently flowing into a valley. Often pieces of the glacier become unstable, breaking off and creating ice avalanches. Ice avalanches “happen all the time and would happen without climate change,” Kargel said. “However, it seems, qualitatively, that there have been many, many more of them in recent years, in the last decade or so than in previous decades.” He said more deaths and damage from such events have likely increased as more hikers, villages and infrastructure appear closer to these mountainous areas. One of the most notable glacier collapses of the past decade that Kargel remembers occurred in 2016 in western Tibet, where the entire lower reaches of two adjacent glaciers broke off within months of each other. One of the avalanches covered more than 3 square miles of land and reached speeds of 90 mph, killing nine people and hundreds of animals. Kargel said these two collapses are “almost certainly climate-related,” as the glaciers experienced unusually high amounts of heavy rainfall and meltwater, which helped lubricate the undersides of the glaciers. While the glacier collapses in Kyrgyzstan and Italy were much smaller (about 1,000 times smaller in volume than other deadly glacier collapses), Kargel said they are also likely related to climate change. “A pretty solid hypothesis is that as temperatures rise [and] the climate is warming, the amount of melting is increasing,” he said. “The effects of meltwater on destabilizing ice masses are increasing, and so the number, frequency and size of glacial ice avalanches should be increasing … and this qualitatively appears to be the case.” Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich, agreed. “It has long been known that meltwater caused by high temperatures increases pressure on the glacier’s subglacial drainage system, which in turn can accelerate glacier movement,” Farinotti said in an email. “This increase in pressure and movement certainly plays a role in such collapses.” Among the biggest downstream impacts from such mountain glacier losses and meltdowns are on freshwater systems, Neff said. For example, glaciers in High Mountain Asia play a critical role in channeling freshwater into river basins used for drinking, irrigation and hydropower by nearly 1.5 billion people. Mountain glaciers may have less ice than estimated, straining fresh water supplies “We put [these glaciers] in a state of change,” Neff said. “The ice will melt faster and deplete drinking water.” And more collapses could be on the way as the melt season progresses. “When the melt season starts in earnest, I would expect to see more of these,” Kargel said. “But hopefully, there won’t be any more deadly ones.”
