The good thing about the weekend: Only the best for the mountains

Zugspitze, Mount Everest or Kilimanjaro: mountains are places of longing for people. Reason enough to make sure that the mountains are well. The UN thought so too and chose December 11th as International Mountain Day many years ago. The motivation: to create awareness for the problems of the mountain regions.

One person who takes this concern seriously is the Swiss glassiologist Felix Keller. He tirelessly plays the violin on the Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland to draw attention to the problem of glacier melting. Of course you can't save a glacier by playing the violin, but the glacier specialist Keller is not just concerned with symbolism, but also with tangible action: He wants the glaciers to be able to survive at least longer, because they are important reservoirs of drinking water all over the world.

His idea: He will collect the meltwater on the Morteratsch glacier in summer and turn it back into snow in winter. For this purpose, he has developed special snow ropes, aluminum tubes that are suspended from rock to rock over the glacier on support cables and can spray water at high pressure from nozzles. The resulting new snow cover is intended to protect the glacier from sun and heat. This means the Morteratsch glacier could survive for 30 to 50 years longer.

But Felix Keller's test facility is just the beginning. “Once the system is fully functioning, it would be important to first go to the regions where the water from the glaciers is already lacking for life” – for example to India and Nepal, where millions of people depend on water from the Himalayas .

Just like the Alps, the highest mountains in the world are suffering from climate change. But not all areas in the Himalayas are affected equally. A measuring station in the Mount Everest region shows consistent glacier surface temperatures at an altitude of 5,000 meters – despite global warming.

Researchers from Austria have developed a theory: the higher air temperatures trigger cooling reactions on some Himalayan glaciers. Glaciers in upper mountain regions respond to warming by increasing their temperature exchange with the warmer surrounding air. This causes cold winds to flow down the slopes, which also protects areas of snow in lower regions. Even though there is still a lot to be researched, it seems clear that the highest mountains in the world have considerable self-healing powers to protect themselves from man-made global warming.

And how can we humans help the mountains? The main goal remains to stop climate change, even if this is becoming increasingly difficult in these politically uncertain times. What everyone can do for the mountains is to have a more sustainable holiday and to be more careful with our nature and our mountains. And every now and then there is a mountain that is doing well and is bursting with strength: the volcanic mountain Etna in Sicily has grown by more than 40 meters this year and is now for the first time the height of 3400 meters exceeded.

But despite some “good news” from the mountains, don’t fool yourself. In the long term, the warmer climate will cause more and more glaciers to melt, and entire mountain landscapes will change due to storms and soil erosion. Things aren't really going well in our mountains, as this year's Mountain Day reminds us once again.

I wish you a good weekend and enjoy reading further.

Your Steffen Bayer, editor plan b

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Compiled by Steffen Bayer.