Germany officially has one less glacier. After the warm summer, the Southern Schneeferner has lost its status as a glacier, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences announced on Monday.
Georadar measurements from mid-September show that the Southern Schneeferner on the Zugspitze – Germany’s highest mountain – has lost an enormous amount of ice. In most places the frozen water is barely 2 meters thick. At its deepest point, the ice mass is still 6 meters thick, compared to 10 meters in 2018. The total surface of the glacier halved in four years to less than 1 hectare.
The scientists at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences expect the remaining ice to melt completely within two years. Due to the small thickness, however, ice movement is no longer to be expected, which means that there is no longer an official glacier.
As a result, only four glaciers remain in Germany, and they also melted considerably in the past summer. These are the Northern Schneeferner and the Höllentalferner on the Zugspitze in the Tyrolean Alps and the Blaueis and Watzmann Glacier in the Berchtesgadener Alps.
Glaciers are fields of mostly ice, snow and firn that usually flow slowly from mountains to the valley under their own pressure. Most of the glaciers that exist today were formed during the last ice age about 15,000 years ago.
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