Climate change has dramatically altered the Swiss Alp landscape — at a quicker pace than expected — as melting glaciers have created more than 1,000 new lakes across in the mountains, a study published Monday showed. The inventory of Swiss Glacial lakes showed that almost 1,200 new lakes have formed in formerly glaciated regions of the Swiss Alps since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850.
Around 1,000 of them still exist today, according to the study published by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag). That is far more than the few hundreds the researchers had expected to find at the beginning of the project. “We were surprised by the sheer numbers,” Daniel Odermatt, head of the Eawag Remote Sensing Group that carried out the study, said in a statement.
He said the “marked acceleration in formation” was also surprising, pointing out that “180 have been added in the last decade alone”. Glaciers in the Swiss Alps are in decline, losing full two percent of their volume last year alone, according to an annual study published by Swiss Academies of Science.
And even if the world were to fully implement the 2015 Paris Agreement — which calls for capping global warming at at least two degrees Celsius — two-thirds of the Alpine glaciers will likely be lost, according to a 2019 study by the ETH technical university in Zurich.
The Eawag assessment showed that there was an initial peak in glacial lake formation in the Swiss Alps between 1946 and 1973, when nearly eight new lakes appeared on average each year. After a brief decline, the lake formation rate surged between 2006 and 2016, with 18 new lakes appearing each year on average, while the water surface swelled by over 400 square metres (4,300 square feet) annually. This, Eawag said, is “visible evidence of climate change in the Alps”.