Fake snow could make it grow Bernd Zoller/imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock

Glacier dying? Snow problem! At least that’s the theory behind a pioneering – and outlandish – attempt to save a landmark glacier in Switzerland.

The idea is to create artificial snow and blow it over the Morteratsch glacier in Switzerland each summer, hoping it will protect the ice and eventually cause the glacier to regrow.

“The major effect of the snow is reflection of sunlight,” says Johannes Oerlemans of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who came up with the plan. Without this covering, the sunlight would begin to melt the ice, but “as long as there’s snow on top, the ice beneath is unaffected,” he told the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, on 27 April. This would be the first large-scale attempt to do this anywhere in the world.


Fleece protection

Like many of its Alpine neighbours, Morteratsch is shrinking because of global warming. It has retreated in length from 8.5 kilometres in 1860 to 6 kilometres today, and is losing 30 to 40 metres per year.

Morteratsch is a huge tourist attraction and something of a national treasure because it is the only glacier with a “snout” that is easily accessible. “Locals claim it’s the only place you can reach a glacier from a wheelchair,” says Oerlemans.

Eager to try and save their prize economic asset, people in the nearby town of Pontresina appealed to Oerlemans and local colleagues to come up with a plan to save Morteratsch.

The locals had been inspired by stories that white fleece coverings on a smaller glacier called Diavolezzafirn had helped it to grow by up to 8 metres in 10 years.

So the locals wondered if a similar scheme would restore Morteratsch, and commissioned Oerlemans to investigate.

Snow through summer

Looking at previous work showing that natural snow can help glaciers grow, he concluded that the glacier could regain up to 800 metres of length within 20 years if it had a covering. He worked out that just a few centimetres of artificial snow blown onto a 0.5 square kilometre plateau high up the glacier each summer could be enough to protect the ice beneath.

“In principle, even the snout could grow back,” says Oerlemans.

Oerlemans says it would take 4000 snow machines to do the job, producing snow by mixing air blasts with water, which cools down through expansion to create ice crystals. The hope is that the water can be “recycled” from small lakes of meltwater alongside the glacier.

But first, a pilot project funded by the locals is under way. In the pilot, Oerleman and his collaborators will spend a season blowing snow onto a small, artificial glacier at the foot of Diavolezzafirn. “We have to carry the glacier through the summer,” he says.

If it works, there are hopes that the Swiss government might provide the millions of Euros needed for the much larger scheme.

“That would need nationwide involvement,” says Oerleman. But if it proved effective, it could inspire similar projects to save glaciers elsewhere in the world.

“The problem with the Morteratsch study,” says Matthias Huss of the University of Freibourg, Switzerland, “is the same as with all of those claiming to save glaciers popping up before: They imply that we can take some engineering measures to cancel the negative effects of climate change. Indeed, we can do this, and we can do it quite efficiently – the method principally works. But the costs for only an incredibly small part of the total glacierized area of a mountain range are immense.”