Schneeferner (Wetterstein) - Glacier retreat
Tourism and transit
978-3-14-100890-6 | Page 101 | Ill. 4
Overview
The Schneeferner, located on the Zugspitzplatt, has been the largest glacier in Germany. Yet it is only a small remnant of a once mighty glacier, which at the beginning of the 19th century still covered the entire plateau, but already lost its extent and thickness in the course of this century.
Ice retreat near the Zugspitze
The map of 1892 still shows the Schneeferner as a coherent glacier. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the glacier, which continued to melt, disintegrated into the southern and northern Schneeferner, with the southern part losing volume and surface area even faster than the northern part due to its unfavourable topographical position with little shading and at best a low input of avalanche snow. Today, only relics of the glacier exist in the south in the form of dead ice fields.
The northern Schneeferner also continued to shrink. It now covers less than one tenth of the original glacier area. But it is not only the area covered by ice that is shrinking, the thickness of the ice is also constantly decreasing. In a few years, the last ice fields of the southern Schneeferner will have disappeared, and in all likelihood the remnants of the northern Schneeferner will also be gone in a few decades.
The worldwide retreat of Alpine glaciers is undoubtedly a consequence of climate change, but when comparing it with earlier phases of expansion, it must always be remembered that there is no such thing as the "natural" size of a glacier, but that their expansion has always fluctuated over thousands of years. In addition to temperature, the amount of precipitation also proves to be an important influencing factor. For example, a glacier can increase in volume despite rising temperatures if plenty of snow falls in winter, and, thus, there is more glacier ice created than melted during the summer period.
