: The heat wave of June has left traces in the Alps where snow is already lacking, affecting glaciers themselves in suspended and the refuges which depend on it.
ats
“Everything dried,” notes Noémie Dagan, guardian of the Selle refuge, 2,673 meters above sea level in the Ecrins, a large mineral massif nestled between Isère and Hautes-Alpes, dominated by two majestic peaks of more than 4000 m.
The snowfield which usually provides water in its 60 -seat refuge already “a little the appearance of what we should have at the end of July, in early August. We are almost a month ahead of the melting of snow, ”she laments.
However, the refuge, devoid of tank, works with tense flows. If the water is missing, it is forced to close: this has already occurred for the first time in mid-August 2023.
Noémie Dagan hopes to get out this year with her two other catchments, including a “rescue”, a kilometer of plastic pipes set up at the cost of human efforts to take the water from a glacier near the Pic de la Grave.
But the slopes on which the pipe was drawn, stiff and unstable, are vulnerable to “increasingly violent” thunderstorms which delight the massif. The Dauphiné tourist society, owner of the refuge, is thinking about more lasting solutions but lacks means, she underlines.
Having her job for fifteen years, Noémie Dagan says he saw “glaciers and the high mountain metamorphose”. However, “glaciers are our water castles (…). I think we are really kinds of sentries who saw the impacts to come, ”she says.
Pump water
Thomas Boillot, high mountain guide for a long time attending the Ecrins, would never have thought of seeing water problems appear in refuges: “It had never crossed our mind,” he says.
And yet the cases multiply “and there will certainly be others,” he lists. Some snowfields, formerly eternal, founded in summer, precipitation becomes scarce and glaciers change shape as they found, disorganizing the supply of refuges.
Where the water previously arrived “by gravity” thanks to the reserves of snow and ice upstream, it will have to be pumped below in the future, he explains.
Scientists believe that climate change is almost twice as important in the Alps than worldwide and that there will be almost no more glaciers in France by 2100.
The eye of the bosses
The year 2025 is also promised for the 1400 Swiss glaciers where the accumulated snow and ice melted five to six weeks earlier than usual, according to the authorities.
Xavier Cailhol, doctoral student in environmental sciences and high mountain guide, just returns from the Mont-Blanc massif, where he also witnessed the “brutal” impact of the heat wave.
“I started June by making a ski Mont-Blanc with 40 cm of powder. And I finished it on completely bright glaciers, even to the Midi needle, so up to 3700 m above sea level, “he said, recalling that the snow layer protects the ice by sending the sun’s rays.
“Above 3200 meters above sea level, it is drier than what we have never seen, including 2022. So yes, it is still quite disturbing for the rest of summer,” says Cailhol.
He wants proof of the acceleration of the melting of the Bossons glacier, a gigantic ice tongue overlooking the valley before the entrance to Chamonix. It started with the appearance of a “stain of pebbles at the beginning, which has now become a structure of pebbles, and which still accelerates the cast iron at this place”, because of its dark color, which absorbs heat more.
Unlike that of the sea of ice, another symbol of a world in danger, the Bossons glacier is clearly visible from the center of Chamonix and its cast iron in fact “necessarily an emblem” of what is happening on other glaciers, he warns.
