Speaker 1:

Mountains are good for the soul. Up here, stress gives away, at least in good weather, to serenity. There's sense of timelessness in mountains. Enduring. Everlasting.

The reality though is that the Alps are not what they were. By some estimates, 30% of the alpine ice cover has disappeared over the past century.

Doug Meere:

A glacier takes several decades, a glacier of this size, to respond to change in the climate.

Speaker 1:

Dr. Doug Meere of Cambridge University has been studying the Arolla Glacier for six years.

Doug Meere:

You can visibly see the snout, the front of the glacier, retreating year by year. It's going back at about 20 metres a year, which is quite dramatic. And we've lost, in height, we've lost all the way from that sort of grey gravel material all the way down to where it is now. Sort of 200 metres of ice is lost in height as well.

This is typical of glaciers all over the Alps, in that they've been retreating steadily in fits and starts, during different periods, for the last 150 years since 1850.

Speaker 1:

And that time scale neatly accords with the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In the global warming debate, the Alps are exhibit A.

In the Saas Valley, there are classic postcard scenes at almost every turn. People live surrounded by nature. At the Ville Haus in [inaudible], the [Zabrigens] think this is close to paradise, and yet Helmut acknowledges the precarious nature of mountain life.

Helmut:

[Foreign language] Indeed, glaciers are dangerous but in specific zones. It's divided up in Switzerland. Some are highest, some low. We live in a rather dangerous area.

Speaker 1:

The water that falls so prettily in the Zabrigen backyard is the run off from glaciers 1000 metres above them.

Tracking the source of the glacial melt requires a punishing drive up precarious slopes. The locals boast this is the highest road in Europe. It's also one of the worst. Tourists don't use it, but valley people are constantly monitoring the terrain, hoping to identify land slippages and rockfalls before they happen.

Alvin:

Fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Alvin [Vilitz] works at the local cable car company, and helps run his family's tourist hotel. His future is directly tied to what happens up in the mountains.

Alvin:

We know the glacier is going back all the time and there is more moraines all the time. It's always a game. Before, years ago, they always told us, "A glacier will grow seven years, and afterwards it'll go back seven years." This rule doesn't, is not true anymore because in the last years, it went back all the time.

Speaker 1:

Glacial melt is naturally enough most obvious in summer. In winter, the glacier advances and retreats under the weight of snow. In another part of Switzerland's valley region, British scientists have spent 10 years investigating the movements of the Arolla glacier.

Speaker 5:

What we're doing is sticking on this metal stem here, which is going on the end of a 100 metre long hose. It's got a special attachment at the end here, and when we pump up the drill, very hot high pressurised water comes out the end of this tip here.

Speaker 1:

The hose tip follows the path of a bore hole, drilled more than 100 metres down through the ice and rock. The object is to see how the hole has been deformed in the past year by the movement of the glacier. More broadly, researchers focused on the tracking of water flows through the glacier.

Speaker 6:

In sort of simple terms, you could imagine the water being a bit like oil, like a lubricant. If you've got inefficient drainage, the waters becomes pressurised and it can actually jack the glacier up on the hydraulic pressure, and therefore it'll move faster because we've reduced the friction. Whereas if you've got really efficient drainage such as, in effect, like rivers flowing underneath the glacier, the pressure's tend to be lower and basically the ice rather than being floated by the water under high pressure, it tends to move much more slowly.

Speaker 1:

Mountain people are used to living with the threats that come from nature. Avalanches, land slippages, rockfalls, and flash floods, which may account for the strong faith of the villages.

Speaker 7:

[foreign language]

Speaker 1:

The Church of Maria [Himmelfarb] dates from 1812. Two previous churches were destroyed by rockfalls, and boulders still occasionally crash down.

Speaker 7:

[Foreign language]

Speaker 1:

Almost all the worshipers here have known tragedy. Ulma [Kalbermartin] and his sister Serena [Bergana] recall as if it were yesterday what happened one late summers day in 1965 on the Allalin Glacier.

Serena:

[Foreign language] Look. I would like to show you where the glacier used to be, and where it fell down. You see where the red moraine is? Where the water is coming down? That's where it broke and slid all the way to the bottom. Where all the men worked.

Speaker 1:

88 workers were buried over half a million cubic tonnes of ice and rock. They'd been building a new dam, the Mattmark, in the valley at the base of the glacier.

Serena:

[Foreign language] It is for me very sad because I knew many of the people who worked there. I was on the back of the Alp. I was on foot and I came around and saw it all. Then we looked to see who was in fact dead.

Speaker 1:

The collapse of the Allalin Glacier remains Switzerland's worst post-war natural disaster and memory of it is seared into the consciousness of valley people.

Helmut:

[foreign language] This is the glacier from here to here. This is where it broke and it came down like an avalanche, and it came all the way up here and then came back, and so all the people ran in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1:

Fears of a similar catastrophe in the Saas Valley are ever-present, and are heightened by scares about global warming.

Helmut:

[foreign language] It's always a theme in the media when something happens. Like in Grindelwald where a glacier broke and 30000 cubic metres of glacier fell. And they calculate that another 70000 metres are waiting to fall.

Speaker 1:

At 2500 metres above sea level, the Arolla glacier is perilous. It's riven with crevasses. Fall in one of them, and there's little likelihood of escape.

Doug Meere:

Here we go. Got a good view of the glacier from up here. [crosstalk] Set the [inaudible] up. See if the glacier's moved since yesterday.

Speaker 1:

Doug Meere and PhD student Becky [Goodsell] have traversed up the moraine wall to survey the glacier.

Doug Meere:

This is the [inaudible]. It's a surveying and electronic distance measuring device, and it and now it's fine. And when you hear that noise, what's happening is, there's an infrared beam.

Becky:

Right.

Doug Meere:

Coming out the front of the [inaudible].

Becky:

Right.

Doug Meere:

It's going out to the prism. Getting reflected back, and when it picks up a reflection, it makes a noise, just to let you know. And the centre of the glacier at this time of year is generally moving at around three centimetres a day.

Becky:

Yeah.

Doug Meere:

And the edge is about one and a half centimetres a day. If the rate of melting today continues, we're probably looking at within somewhere between 70 and 100 years, this glacier will have separated into a couple of small, cirque glaciers, and will not really be able to be classified as a valley glacier as such.

Speaker 10:

Thank you. [Foreign language]. Train tickets please. [French]

Speaker 1:

Extinction of the glaciers would be disastrous for the tourist trade. It's Switzerland's second biggest earner.

Speaker 11:

[Spanish]

Speaker 1:

Even in relatively quiet valleys like the Sass, foreign visitors have been a source of an unprecedented prosperity.

Alvin:

You'll like this.

Speaker 13:

Well, I hope I'll like it a lot actually. It looks pretty good.

Speaker 1:

At the [Vilitz] family's hotel in Saas-Grund, Alvin is weary of the doomsday scenarios being promoted.

Alvin:

If I'm speaking with other people, they say the time is for getting better. It will cool down, and the glaciers will grow again.

Speaker 1:

There are people in the Swiss government who tell you that?

Alvin:

Yeah. Yeah. Especially. Because I have a lot of connections with people. We're studying the glaciers and so on. They're saying it was already years before where the glaciers went back all the time, but the time will go on and we'll get a new area.

Speaker 1:

A new growth?

Alvin:

A new growth. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Tourism isn't the only industry likely to be hit by climate change. Switzerland's heavily subsidised rural industries will be directly effected, and with it, important elements of the national heritage. In summer, the famous "Fighting Cows" of the valley are able to graze in the high pastures.

This is the time of the year when villages hold what are called "Cow parties," and the star of this one is Mandolin. [crosstalk] Mandolin's owner, Sebastian [Etamartin] explains why she's being feted as queen cow of the mountain.

Sebastian:

[foreign language] Well, this is actually the one with the most temperament and so much power. It's the first time, but it went great immediately. [crosstalk]

Speaker 1:

Sebastian doesn't want to contemplate big changes in the patterns of his life. Which is understandable enough, but it may be forced upon him. Switzerland seems particularly beset by our [inaudible] world. The 90s have been the hottest decade of the century.

Becky:

Okay. But the edge of the mover.

Speaker 16:

Right. Okay. Right.

Speaker 1:

This glacier is like a vast laboratory. Experiments produce much needed data. But drawing definitive conclusions is another matter entirely.

Doug Meere:

You'll never get a consensus amongst scientists as to whether it's definitely human induced global warming, greenhouse effect. It's certainly a very plausible theory and if we wait, the several hundred years that it would require for us to be absolutely sure whether or not this was the greenhouse effect or global warming, human beings then, it would be too late to do anything about it because of the time lags involved in climate systems. We would have had several hundred years of greenhouse effect, and it would probably have an effect on global climate for hundreds of thousands of years after that.

Speaker 1:

By which time of course, the glaciers would have long since vanished into history.