By 2100, glaciers around the world will cover a land area the size of Finland

Where we stand now, the Tsanfleuron glacier tongue would once have licked our boots. Now, 170 years later, we are dry south of the Les Diablerets ski area. And not only that: a yellow flower blooms here with fleshy leaves like fat fingers. The saxifrage seems to be having a good time on this much too warm autumn day at 2300 meters.

There is no humus here. The saxifrage, the willow that creeps along the ground like a shrub and even the lonely, forty centimeter high larch get the necessary nutrients somewhere between the gravel of the moraine and from the air. Elsewhere, Fleischer’s fireweed and Alpine sorrel manage to take root in the wasteland.

They are among the pioneer plants of the glacier foregrounds. At first glance they seem like “depressing places,” says glaciologist Matthias Huss of ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, WSL. The visibility is gray and horrible, and the thawing ice and warming rocks make rumbling sounds everywhere.

From here it is two kilometers to the place where the glacier starts today. By the end of this century, Switzerland’s glaciers will have retreated so much that up to 800 square kilometers of land will become available if CO2 emissions are not reduced. In the best case, the ice surface will shrink by 550 square kilometers if global warming can be limited to 1.5 degrees. In the middle scenario with a warming of approximately 3 degrees, the area the size of the canton of Solothurn is free (-775 km2).

Or the other way around: in the worst case, according to Matthias Huss’s calculations, there will be only 31 square kilometers of glacier surface, at best 252 square kilometers. 170 years ago, when the last Little Ice Age ended, Switzerland was still covered in an impressive 1,788 square kilometers of ice – the size of the canton of Zurich.

The world’s land area the size of Nepal or Finland will become available by 2100 – and that’s not even taking into account the vast ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, where changes are harder to calculate. Huss and the French researcher Jean-Baptiste Bosson calculated this; the research recently appeared in the journal ‘Nature’.

There will still be glaciers around the world, but especially in Europe they will shrink by more than half, even in the most optimistic scenario. While this ecosystem with cold-loving creatures such as a stonefly that lives in the gorges of the Andes, a special annelid that lives on the ice in Tibet, or the glacier mosquito in Austria, is disappearing, a saxifrage is taking up residence in this place. .

After ten years, larches start to grow and after thirty years they are already ten meters high. After 50 years, trees can stand where a glacier once was.

Here in the glacier foreland of the Glacier de Tsanfleuron there is only this one small larch tree, even though the area has been ice-free for 170 years. This has to do with the nutrient-poor limestone soil on which we stand. Biologist Christian Rixen of the WSL also points out: “It takes a lot of time before cows can graze on a glacier platform. Alpine meadows have evolved over hundreds to thousands of years.” Even if the ground is covered with pioneer plants, this does not mean that it can be cultivated.

Everything takes longer here. The silver root that Rixen found on a mountain top had roots that were 140 years old. Some perennial alpine grasses are as old as 6,000 years; older than any gnarled pine tree in Switzerland.

It is precisely because of such rare specialists in a cool habitat that the authors of the Nature study demand that we should think about protecting the land that becomes free. This is the place where plants and animals retreat when it gets too hot further on. But here too, new storage lakes and dams could be constructed for fossil-free electricity production.

Today, 30 percent of the world’s glaciated areas are protected, and another 17 percent are protected by the Antarctic Treaty. In Switzerland, the glacier areas in the Glarnerland around the Tödi and the Aletsch Glacier in Valais are currently protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. “The other areas that become free form a kind of legal vacuum,” says Huss.

We have crossed the glacier platform and are standing in front of the Tsanfleuron. The meltwater flows in thousands of streams on the rocks. Matthias Huss and two glaciology colleagues from the University of Freiburg brought geography students here to show them how the glacier changes the landscape. How he piles up moraines, how he polishes rock slabs, grinds rubble into pebbles and creates lakes.

It is not good if glaciers release less and less water in the summer, while this will be urgently needed in the future. Landmasses that are free of snow and ice also warm more due to their darker color. But there is a positive aspect: as soon as something grows somewhere that was previously bare, extra carbon is stored from the atmosphere. CO2 is stored in the growing glacier foregrounds, even though there are no large trees there yet.

Bosson and Huss also took this into account in their research: they estimated that 45 to 85 megatons of CO2 will be stored on the world’s released land this century. This corresponds to a biomass of 2,200 to 10,600 square kilometers of rainforest. So from the size of the canton of St.Gallen upwards. This cannot appreciably slow global warming if at the same time rainforests the size of Switzerland are being cut down every year. But any soil that can retain moisture or withhold heavy rain will be important in the future.

We climb up until we see the mountain station of the ski area. A section of glacier protrudes several meters: in summer it is covered with white cloths to prevent the glacier from melting further and to ensure that skiers can reach the ski lift after crossing the glacier plateau. In fifteen years, approximately 50 meters of ice thickness have been lost here. The Tsanfleuron glacier here lost about three meters this summer alone, and even five meters at the bottom.

Matthias Huss says: “The changes are enormous. Over the past two summers, even the glaciers at over 4,000 meters were free of snow.” This means that the glacier is no longer sufficiently fed from above. If the snow in winter cannot compensate for the loss in summer, the glacier becomes a corpse. Like the Tsanfleuron. “He’s dead. A zombie,” Horst Machguth, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg, told the students.

He, Huss and Professor Martin Hoelzle have been guiding young people on glaciers for a long time. Hoelzle said in the morning in the parking lot, before the excursion to the glacier started: “I am completely disillusioned. Despite a lot of education in society, our work has no influence on political actions regarding global warming.”

Hus sees it differently. He says interest in their work has increased significantly over the past five years. Now even Al-Jazeera is asking for interviews. “The glaciers have the power to make climate change visible in an impressive way. After all, the population has approved the glacier initiative.”

In any case, the students on this excursion are impressed by the glacier; many set foot on it for the first time. During the lunch break, a student says to her colleague: “Maybe we will live to see that everything here has disappeared.”

Meanwhile, tourists walk along a marked path over the glacier; the ski area is still marketing itself with the ice as long as it can and calls itself “Glacier 3000”.