MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Europe is the world's fastest warming continent. Temperatures there are increasing at twice the average global rate. Nowhere is this more visually striking than in the Swiss Alps, where glaciers have lost nearly two-thirds of their ice throughout the past century. As they disappear, NPR's Rob Schmitz reports that Europe's biggest rivers are losing a crucial source of their summer water flow.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Barbara Achrainer sips a latte on a hotel veranda along a busy lakeside boulevard in Lucerne. The hot air over the turquoise water forms a haze that silhouettes the Alps in the distance. Achrainer's moved from hotel to hotel like this one since late May when she was forced out of her home. She had just begun a job as a manager of the storied Hotel Fafleralp perched along a mountainside above the village of Blatten. She and her crew were preparing for their first guests of the season when suddenly her workers started running for the exits.
BARBARA ACHRAINER: And they really literally jumped into the car and left. And I was like, what's going on?
SCHMITZ: On a peak towering over Blatten sits the Birch Glacier. Scientists observing it noticed it was starting to slide down the mountain much faster than it usually does, on a trajectory so dangerous that they persuaded the local government to immediately evacuate the village's 300 people. A week later, the glacier broke loose and came crashing down.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking German).
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SCHMITZ: Video shot by a local man shows a white cloud of ice, rock and sand crashing down the steep mountainside across the valley. Achrainer was working in the hotel above the valley when the landslide hit. The lights flickered and went dark. She went outside and hiked to a nearby cliff to see what had happened.
ACHRAINER: It's beyond imagination. It's something that you know the village is there, but there is no village. It's just basically a pile of mud and sand and rocks.
SCHMITZ: The church, town hall, all of the village's homes buried in an instant.
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DANIEL FARINOTTI: An event of that size is certainly nothing I've seen in Switzerland before, kind of not in the recent past.
SCHMITZ: Daniel Farinotti is a glaciologist at the public university ETH Zurich.
FARINOTTI: The $1 million question is, did Blatten happen because of climate change? What we can say is that there were elements in this process chain that may well be related to climate change.
SCHMITZ: Farinotti and his team at ETH had observed an uptick in rockfall from the glacier for more than a decade. He suspects it was caused by warmer temperatures. He's been studying these changes for years. According to his team at ETH Zurich, glaciers in Switzerland lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016, and now he says they're shrinking even more rapidly.
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SCHMITZ: Wearing crampons, a harness and a backpack full of monitoring equipment, Farinotti leads a team of students up the pockmarked dirty ice of the Rhone Glacier, the source of the Rhone River, which flows to France.
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SCHMITZ: They carefully leap over crevasses whose icy depths emanate blue light in the echoes of meltwater flowing through a network of cracks and caverns below.
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SCHMITZ: As his team erects a pole with a GPS receiver and a solar panel, Farinotti peers at the granite mountainsides looming more than 500 feet high on either side of the ice. In 1850, the glacier was flush with those ridges, he says. In the past decade, though, Farinotti says it's melted much faster.
FARINOTTI: Oh, where we're standing, we're losing several meters of ice a year - maybe five, six, kind of in thickness. And then in terms of length, that's typically 2-, 3-, 4%, depending on the year.
SCHMITZ: And at that rate, says Farinotti...
FARINOTTI: If we stay on track with the climate we have at the moment, that brings us to a very warm climate, and that would mean that this glacier disappears kind of the late century. So by 2100 you wouldn't find any ice anymore.
SCHMITZ: Farinotti says glaciers are nature's water towers. The water they've stored for centuries flows down Europe's biggest rivers during the hot and dry summer months, replacing rainwater and snowmelt from the spring. And the Rhone isn't the only river whose source is a glacier - the Rhine, the Danube, the Po - the continent's biggest rivers all start here. And when these glaciers are gone, Farinotti says, these rivers will be forever altered.
Hundreds of miles downstream from the Alps, Steffen Bauer leans over the rail of a tugboat to check the river's depth. Here in Duisburg, a port on the lower reaches of the Rhine River, a massive digital sign reads 250 centimeters in big red numbers - a little more than eight feet.
STEFFEN BAUER: So the normal water level is - I think it's normally around three meter, three meter 50. And now we are one meter less compared to the normal situation.
SCHMITZ: Bauer is CEO of HGK Shipping. He says in recent years, the late summer months have met record-low depth levels on the Rhine, the main artery of Germany's economy.
BAUER: So low-water situation was. also in the past. It was always there. But the problem is it stands longer. So for a longer period, we are in this situation. So it's now more between two, three, up to four months, especially in the late summer, and that's then a huge impact.
SCHMITZ: In the hot, dry summer of 2018, the water level was so low that barges could no longer navigate the river. That spurred Bauer and his engineers to design a fleet of low-water barges that can transport up to 600 tons of goods in just over three feet of water. Bauer's team is constructing as many as they can. But in an industry that builds just a hundred barges a year, he says it'll take a while to adjust to these new water levels.
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SCHMITZ: Back on the Rhone Glacier, glaciologist Daniel Farinotti's team is preparing to test how fast water is flowing off the glacier. They add a visual element to test the water flow - a colored dye. Within seconds of pouring it in, the glacial stream turns bright pink, flowing over a waterfall where the neon cascade disappears into a crevasse.
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SCHMITZ: It makes for a good photo, but for Farinotti, the more striking visuals can be seen year to year as the glacier recedes before his eyes.
FARINOTTI: When we talk climate change, we are talking about one degree of warming of global average temperatures. I mean, what does that mean? If you think of heating up your house one degree more, I mean, do you feel it? - well, maybe. But if you look at what one degree of warming does to a glacier, I mean, there, you know, you don't need to be a scientist to figure out, whoa, that's a big change.
SCHMITZ: A big change, he says, that will have a cascade of consequences on rivers, on the ecosystem and on all of us. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, the Rhone Glacier, Switzerland.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIPSE, ET AL. SONG, "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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