It was an “instant classic” viral video. A hiker enjoying a guided tour in the Tian Shan MountainsKyrgyzstan pulled out his phone and capturedThe sectional collapse and subsequent avalanche from an enormous glacier. The suspense builds like a horror film as the huge, billowing wall made of ice, rocks, and debris moves closer to Harry Shimmin, a U.K. hiker whose steady hand keeps the picture on his phone crystal-clear.
The avalanche finally bears down upon Shimmin, who behaved like a voyeur while watching dangerous dramas in which he was actually a star. At the last minute, and after a couple of “Oh, dear Gods,” he hastily dropped behind a rock as the barrage unleashed by the climate-afflicted glacier began pelting him and the group of hikers travelling with him. They all survived.
Simultaneously exciting and terrifying, Shimmin’s video affords us all a rare glimpse of the unstoppable power of a collapsing glacier. It used to be rare. It happened just a week earlier in northeastern Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. 11 hikers were killedWhen a breakaway chunkThe Marmolada GlacierA similar onslaught was unleashed. Not coincidentally, this occurred during a “record-breaking heat wave during the country’s worst drought in 70 years,” which has deprived the mountains of winter snow. The drought is also threatening to dry out the Po River Valley, which is in dire need of water. produceThe olive oilAnd it is world-famous risotto rice that makes it among the world’s most storied agricultural regions.
The Po River Valley was able to depend on the runoff from the Cottian Alps’ snowfall, which accumulated in large quantities. This is where the mountainous borders between France and Italy meet. However, now it’s gotten so dire in the Alps that the Swiss are now covering up their iconic ice with expensive UV-resistant “geotextile” blankets. It’s a desperate bid to slow what is increasingly inevitable. One prediction is that all of the mountainous nations’ glaciers could be gone by the turn of the next century. In 2021, a Swiss ski resort essentially put a band aid on this broken leg by throwing 1 million square feet of “giant fleece blankets” over a titanic glacier on Mount Titlis. Meanwhile, in the French Alps, the Tignes ski resort closed its summer glacier skiing season “a month earlier than scheduled,” truncating what used to be a summer continuation of skiing to just 14 days, the shortest in the history of the resort.
A heat wave that swept across the English Channel sent parts of the U.K. above the 40 degree Celsius (104 degree Fahrenheit) mark. first time in recorded history. The “heat apocalypse” stoked destructive flames along a wildfire-scarred swath of southern Europe stretching from Portugal to Greece. According to The Independent, those fires produced an estimated “11 million tonnes of planet-heating emissions.” The recent trendFears are also being stoked due to European heat waves more glacial disasters. The continent’s glaciers are melting “faster than ever,” and, as AP News reported, a satellite assessment in 2021 (that’s Before this year’s historic heat wave) found that glaciers are “losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
On February 7, 2021, a wedge of glacier-covered rock more than 500 meters wide and 180 meters thick just “suddenly let go” in the Himalayas and, as BBC News reported in June of that year, a mixture of rock, ice and water hit the valley floor below “like 15 atomic bombs.” Over 200 people living and working in the Chamoli district of the Indian state of Uttarakhand were killed and hydroelectric infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of dollars was lost in the deluge. Scientists are careful not to overplay climate change. The direct cause, researchers did write that “glacier shrinkage uncovers and destabilises mountain flanks and strongly alters the hydrological and thermal regimes of the underlying rock.” Sadly, the mountainous state was hit again on April 23, 2021, when a glacier “burst” sparked an avalanche in Sumna, this time killing 16Near the Indo-China border
Just a month later, on May 20, a chunk of Antarctic ice reportedly “three times the size of New Delhi” broke free and set sailin the sweltering oceans. Dubbed “A-76” by scientists, the “world’s largest iceberg” is destined to methodically melt like another viral sensation, an earlier breakaway iceberg known as “A-68.” Then it happened again. In November, a huge hunk of the Perito Moreno Glacier fell into the waters abutting Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina’s “fast melting” Patagonia region. It was much to the amazement of “stunned” onlookers who, like Harry Shimmin, found themselves bearing witness to the fallout of anthropogenic climate change while on holiday.
But it doesn’t end there.
On March 5, 2022, another group of tourists in Argentina “oohed and ahhed” when a glacier broke off of a 60-meter-high cliff, plunged and then re-emerged from the sea. Twenty-one days later, an “ice shelf bigger than New York City” broke off in an area in eastern Antarctica that scientists have, according to The Washington Post, thought to be “relatively stable and far less vulnerable to global warming compared to ice in western Antarctica.” Ominously, a trio of scientists observed that “there is enough ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet to raise sea levels by several meters, and if East Antarctica starts losing significant amounts of ice, the impact on sea levels could be measured in tens of meters.”
Robert Krulwich, a great science journalist, explained recently in a superb animated videoFor CBS “Sunday Morning,” the last time atmospheric CO2 concentrations were this high was 2.5 million years ago. Known as the Pliocene Era, the Earth was “about 3 or 4 degrees” (Celsius) warmer and global sea levels were 55 feet higherThey are more than they are today. That’s right … 55!
Is that what’s in store for us over the next century should we continue to burn hydrocarbons like there’s no tomorrow? We certainly seem hell-bent on finding out, because we’ve basically doubled-downAfter the conference, carbon emissions over-hypedCarbon interregnum during pandemic. And if our Anthropocene Era only sees Half of the Pliocene sea level rise, there will, in fact, be no tomorrow for millions, if not billions of humans crowded along the Earth’s coasts or living downstream from the world’s melting glaciers. It promises to be the most devastating natural disaster mankind has ever experienced. But just like Shimmin, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.
It is even possible to see it from space.
Satellite images from the European Union’s Earth observation program show how drastically the aforementioned Po River has changedThese two years have been a great experience. They named the satellite “Copernicus” in honor of the Renaissance genius who challenged centuries of church canon by proving the Earth, and by extension humankind, was not at the center of the universe, but rather it (and humans) revolved around the Sun.
Copernicus now revolves around Earth, revealing, Euronews reported, the stark impact we’re having on this staggeringly rare harbor for life in, as far as we’ve found, an otherwise life-averse solar system. It is visible in the Po Valley and has helped to sustain 125 municipalities as well as numerous farms that are now subject to rationing.
NASA satellite data from early July showed similar parched areas of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. This lake is becoming increasingly devoid of its famedly briny waters. In fact, it now sits at its “lowest level in 175 years of record keeping,” accordingTo Discover MagazineThe satellite images were paired with photos that showed how the lake is suffering from a severe, regional drought.
The once-greater lake’s salty sister in California is suffering a similar retreat. Mono Lake was miraculously saved from certain death by a citizen-led effort. campaign in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. But now, its once-ubiquitous “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers have long-since faded and the lake is again endangered. This time, it’s not the excessive redirection of its tributary waters to quench the thirst of millions of Southern Californians. Water is still pulled, but now Mono Lake, like all the examples in this sad litany, is also battling a drought made more disastrous by a “two-decade run of extreme warming and drying.”
Lake Mead is located approximately 350 miles southwest of Mono Lake. This lake is at its lowest point since 1937 when it was filled with water. It is nearing the nadir of a “22-year downward trend.” That’s per scientists at NASA’s Earth ObservatoryThe shocking satellite photos show the lake drying up in three stages, as shown by, which released the shocking set of satellite images recently. You may have seen ‘em, because the photos had a viral moment as they made the rounds on social media, like the media of avalanchesAnd floodsAnd cattle dropping deadIt was before it. Lake Mead was already in the news, especially with the receding waters. possible murder victims. What’s not a mystery is what’s killing the “largest reservoir in the United States,” which, as NASA notes, supplies water to “millions of people across seven states, tribal lands, and northern Mexico,” but is currently “filled to just 27 percent of capacity.”
Ironically, its closest customer, Las Vegas – the home of unbridled abundance – has a surprising amount of it. low drawMead and an efficient systemIt captures, treats, returns and returns water to the lakes. Southern Nevada still gets its water. 90 percent of its waterFrom the drought-ravaged Colorado River via Lake Mead, and, AP News reported, it’s still home to 200,000 swimming pools, with 1,300 more pools added annually. It’s also home to an estimated 3,000 “commercial” pools that serve 40 million tourists who fly and drive to Las Vegas every year. These commercial pools, it’s not surprising, are not affected by. new water restrictions. One critic of the restrictions, who happens to own a custom pool design business, said without irony, “When you’re in the desert and it’s 100 degrees outside on a regular basis, it’s part of life to have a pool,” and “having a pool in Las Vegas is like having a second car … it’s that common.”
In sun-baked desert metropolises such as Las Vegas, pools and second cars are all available. Phoenix(with the most pools per capita) are local cogs in a globe-spanning, fossil-fueled economic machine that’s driving the climate feedback loop now threatening the riverThat helps to fill those ubiquitous swimming pools. Air conditioning can be used to survive superheated environments. pumps out CO2This further heats the planet, making air conditioning more important. In turn, this accelerates the heating that melts glaciers, dries up lakes, and ignites wildfires in rapidly increasing doom-loop.
This feedback loop has also contributed to the suffering of over 2 billion people who are currently living in extreme heat. India, PakistanAnd ChinaFor impoverished climate refugees fleeing Central America, and for millions of low-carbon-producing, sea-level BangladeshisInauspiciously caught between collapsing Himalayan glaciers The melting breakaway ice shelves are now bobbing in the warm oceans.
The days when we could just sit back and admire these climate catastrophes are long gone. Now the viral moments are much closerTo home … from Kansas to KentuckyFrom NebraskaTo TexasAnd MaineWe are all becoming more like Harry Shimmin as climate change becomes more pervasive. Earth’s climate is breaking through the fourth wallTo show us that we can’t afford the luxury of voyeurism.
In essence, Mother Nature’s “invisible hand” is imposing punishment on an economic system that pretends we can sustain unlimited growth on a planet of limited resources and, astonishingly, somehow remain free of the feedback loop’s environmental consequences. In fact, that’s what Mother Nature is telling us in these viral moments. Her invisible hand is imposing a harsh form of ecological discipline on an economy that is disconnected from real life.
We have no other option than to end the feedback loop.
