Although the last new website entry seems to be the 11th of July – it doesn’t mean that we are sitting still!
In fact, quite the opposite. A lot of work has been done around testing the App, making changes to the app and creating new hikes.
It’s also been an eye-opening summer. I spent my summer mostly in the French Alps, where the conditions were poor. That is: it was blistering hot and bone-dry. No snow on the mountains – and even the glaciers were having no protective snow cover until about 3500-3600 meters. Devastating.
Simply devastating. There was an abundance of water in the glacial rivers due to the extremely high glacial run-off. Glaciers lost meters of ice. For your consideration: it takes about 10 meters of surplus snow to create just 1 meter of ice. Decades of ice has been lost in that sense, in just a couple of months.
The causes are multiple, but all linked and connected. A very dry winter season to start with. With no precipitation, the altitude doesn’t matter: there is no snow to fall. However, even in the occassions that there was snow falling, the freezing level was high. This transitioned into the spring time, which was one of the hottest on record across the Alps, and again bone-dry. And followed by a very intense, hot and dry summer.
For now, we can only hope for a cool, northwest-dominated precipitation rich October-June.
