Glaciers are melting rapidly – and since the 2000s, scientists have been recording and researching changes in their volume more and more precisely. In contrast, hardly anything is known about how glaciers changed during the 20th century. Although there are a handful of studies that reconstruct the surface topography of individual glaciers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these partially show large discrepancies with existing models when it comes to estimating the corresponding glacier volume.
In a study that has just been published in the scientific journal external pageThe Cryospherecall_made, a team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL have reconstructed the topography of all Swiss glaciers in 1931. Based on these reconstructions and comparisons with data from the 2000s, the researchers conclude that the glacier volume halved between 1931 and 2016.