The Alpine Club has been observing a dramatic retreat of glaciers in the Austrian high mountains for decades. According to experts, the glaciers will be a thing of the past in about forty years – with far-reaching consequences for the ecosystems there. Animals and plants are settling in places where there used to be ice. On the Pasterze you can already find larch and currants.
“We now have a very large, stately currant tree in the glacier foreland, where there was a glacier about twenty years ago,” Barbara Pucker, director of the Hohe Tauern National Park, explains to ORF. A larch forest is also spreading.
Pasterzensee with considerable depth
The lake that was created by the retreating glaciers, the Pasterzensee, is increasingly shaping the landscape. At 48 meters, it has a considerable depth. The lake is still cold, but in time, Pucker suspects, numerous animal species will settle there.
Even if this winter was cold and the spring wet, the head of the Alpine Club’s scientific glacier measuring service, Andreas Kellerer-Pirklbauer, assumes that the glaciers in Austria will continue to lose mass and length this year.
Glaciers only exist because of the reserves they have built up
Meanwhile, an average annual glacier retreat rate “of more than 20 meters is unfortunately not unusual,” Kellerer-Priklbauer said at a specialist conference in July. There is no glacier in Austria anymore “that has a breeding area that even comes close to preserving the existing ice mass. “The Austrian glaciers only exist thanks to the ice reserves that were built up in the past.”
Source: Krone
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