The Marmolada Glacier is losing 7 cm per day and will be gone by 2040. The collapse of a part of the Marmolada killed 11 people in 2022. Swiss glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023. The retreat of Alpine glaciers due to climate change is altering the borders between states. How long does a landscape last if not in the moment we perceive it?
“If the Alps were granted a perfectly invariable temperature, if they were no longer subjected, alternately, to freezing blasts and to scorching heat, they might more correctly be termed ‘eternal.’ They might still continue to decay, but their abasement would be much less rapid. When rocks are covered up by a sheet of glacier they do enjoy an almost invariable temperature. The extremes of summer and winter are unknown to rocks which are so covered up,—a range of a very few degrees is the most that is possible underneath the ice. There is, then, little or no disintegration from unequal expansion and contraction. Frost, then, does not penetrate into the heart of the rock, and cleave off vast masses. The rocks, then, sustain grinding instead of cleaving. Atoms, then, come away instead of masses. (…) The points of difference which are so evident between the operations of heat, cold, and water, and those of glaciers upon rocks, are as follow. The former take advantage of cracks, fissures, joints, and soft places; the latter do not. The former can work underneath overhanging masses; the latter cannot. The effects produced by the former continually increase, because they continually expose fresh surfaces by forming new cracks, fissures, and holes. The effects which the latter produce constantly diminish, because the area of the surfaces operated upon becomes less and less, as they become smoother and flatter. What can one conclude, then, but that sun, frost, and water, have had infinitely more to do than glaciers with the fashioning of mountain-forms and valley-slopes? (…) Yet there are some who refuse to believe that sun, frost, and water have played an important part in modelling the Alps, and hold it as an article of their faith that the Alpine region ‘owes its present conformation mainly to the action of its ancient glaciers’.”
— From “The Ascent of the Matterhorn” by E. Whymper, 1880