in the Ecrins massif, heat waves threaten the white giants

From up there, the panorama offers a striking view of La Meije and its wonders: the Grand Pic and its tapered ridges which culminate at 3,983 meters, the steep slopes of the Râteau, the round back of the Col de la Girose… A little more below, a desolate landscape appears. The glaciers are melting at lightning speed and the traces of this disaster are visible to the naked eye: crevasses as far as the eye can see, wrinkled sides and snow that takes on orange hues as the great white becomes stunted.

The Ecrins massif, between the Hautes-Alpes and Isère, is at the forefront of global warming. The extreme heat of summer has dramatically accelerated the melting of the glaciers around the massif, whose highest peak exceeds 4,000 meters.

From the cable car, just observe the Girose glacier to see the damage. “Here, it has lost five meters in thickness in one year”, watch, stake in hand, Xavier Cointeaux, co-president of the La Grave guides office, during a glacier walk with a dozen French and Spanish tourists. At 3,200 meters, Wednesday August 10, the mercury reached 8.9°C at the end of the morning, more than two degrees above the seasonal maximum.

Johan Chaumar and his wife, who came to discover this glacier with their 14-year-old daughter, wonder if “She will still be able to do it with her children“. They concede to have been “more than sensitized” by discovering the crevasses of more than ten meters and the water which flows abundantly. “Global warming is not necessarily concrete on a daily basis, but here we can see it and it gives goosebumps.”

“People don’t know glaciers and find it beautiful, for me it’s so ugly and sad…” writes Xavier Cointeaux. “In ten years, this glacier will no longer exist if it continues to lose more than five meters per year. When you see the acceleration of global warming, if we have several summers like that, it’s the end of the glaciers. “

“I’ve lived here for thirty-three years and I’ve never experienced such a dramatic summer. The mountain is going down the drain, it makes you want to cry.”

Xavier Cointeaux, co-president of the La Grave guides office

at franceinfo

The guide acknowledges having a “very negative approach to the future”, but try not to hold a speech “too alarmist” during his walks on the ice field. “However, you have to explain what is happening, what is going to happen, it is so important.” The following ? “The mountain will not collapse, but everything will change. We will do rock runs, we will shift the mountaineering season and we will adapt. We have no choice.”

According to scientists, half of the surface of the glaciers of the Ecrins massif has already disappeared. And the models are hardly optimistic. “At the scale of the Alps, climatologists predicted a loss of 85 to 95% of these glaciers at the end of the century, but we realize that these estimates are already outdated and that everything is going faster, worries Ludovic Ravanel, research director at the CNRS in Chambéry and geomorphologist. At the end of the century, there will be almost no glaciers left in the Alps.”

Glaciers, which consist of a layer of snow on a layer of ice, are supposed to last the summer, and regenerate each winter thanks to new snowfalls. Last winter, the snow was scarce, and the abnormally hot months of May and June melted it. “The snow removal came very early, so the melting period is very long and the glaciers are living beyond their reserves”, explains Ludovic Ravanel. At the top of the Glaciers de la Meije cable car, it normally freezes every night, even in summer. In 2022, this has not been the case since mid-June. Scientists at the Ecrins National Park fear an even worse melt than during the scorching summer of 2003.

Faced with the observation of climate change which is accelerating and intensifying in the Alps, which are warming up more than twice as fast as the French average, what to do? “We take global warming in the head, inevitably, we think about it”, concedes David Le Guen, commercial director of the cable car. Its domain is a rarity that attracts onlookers, mountaineers and skiers in winter, in search of adrenaline on one of the largest off-piste domains in the world.

“30% of our clientele is foreign and it is obvious that it has a strong impact on transport, but we need them to come, that’s the whole paradox. There are some who want to close everything and stop everything but 90% of the territory’s economy depends on tourism.”

David Le Guen, commercial director of the Meije cable car

at franceinfo

Preserving the mountain while continuing to exploit it: this is also the thorny dilemma of replacing the old Girose glacier ski lift, which allows you to climb to 3,550 meters. On the one hand, those who advocate its replacement by a third section of the cable car, on the other, those who oppose it to let the mountain breathe.

The mayor of La Grave, the town on which the Girose glacier is located, is pushing for the first option, and wants to believe that the replacement of the infrastructure will not weaken the glacier tongue, on the contrary. “I am a practical ecologist”, says Jean-Pierre Pic from his office overlooking the Tabuchet, another glacier in La Meije. He saw him recoil from “600 meters” since his childhood. “La Meije will not disappear, the glaciers will”, breathes the mayor, who wants to show a black and white photo from the 1930s. Several guides pose in the valley, including his great-grandfather Prosper who wears a mustache, like him.

At the beginning of the 20th century, faced with the influx of Britons in search of summits, his ancestor had participated in the creation of the Aigle refuge, at 3,450 meters. “They climbed with donkeys up to 2,500 meters, and they ended up on foot, with the stove, the wood, do you realize?” At the beginning of August, the refuge was forced to close temporarily: there was a lack of water and access was becoming dangerous.

Last year, global warming led to the permanent closure of the Pilatte refuge, well known to mountaineers, on the other side of La Meije. The building built in 1954, perched at 2,577 meters, was partly built on an unstable rocky area that cracked due to the retreat of the glacier. Glacial decompression threatened the building, whose dining room was crossed by a fault. “We lived every year with this sword of Damocles, says Mathilde Dahuron, guardian of the refuge for eleven years. The closure was a cold shower, it’s still a part of our life.”

Now guardian of the Carrelet refuge, a small haven of peace overlooking the local peaks and the torrent-flowing Vénéon, she alternates between spite and nostalgia as she thinks of the Pilatte refuge, an hour and a half walk higher. . “I went back there at the start of the season, and I saw ibex droppings, animals that come back. It feels good to think that there is no longer any human impact in this place, but I also saw this melting glacier…”Browsing through the photos of the refuge and the evolution of the glacier tongue, Mathilde Dahuron feels “anger”.

“The mountain is changing and it’s our fault. Nothing changes on a daily basis, that saddens me. The government does nothing, it’s not its priority, but the glaciers are our water, and soon it won’t there will be more.”

Mathilde Dahuron, guardian of the Carrelet refuge

at franceinfo

Glaciers play an essential role: they constitute a substantial stock of fresh water, supply rivers and rivers, and participate in irrigation, supply or cooling of nuclear power stations located in the valleys. They also regulate an entire ecosystem that suffers enormously from high temperatures. In the Ecrins massif, vegetation is a month ahead of schedule, mowing started very early. “We picked blueberries at the end of June”, hallucinates Cyril Coursier, technician at the Ecrins National Park in Briançon. “The IPCC report [Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat]I live it every day by observing the landscape.”

In the region, global warming evokes a date: December 20, 2020, when a collapse took away an entire section of mountain in Monêtier-les-Bains, above Tabuc. The crash of the rocks in the valley made a noise there “phenomenal”. It is the permafrost, this terrestrial surface frozen in depth for thousands of years and which acts like the glue of the mountains, which, by warming up, caused the collapse. “I immediately understood that it was global warming”, remembers the mayor, Jean-Marie Rey.

“Now, in addition to the risk of avalanche and overflow of the Guisane, we live with this risk of landslide. We have had to adapt and we are going to install metal nets near certain houses.”The mayor, also a high mountain guide, pulls out two pictures from a pocket. The first dates from 1980, the second from 2018. The Casset glacier has retreated a hundred meters and its disappearance is now only a matter of years. “That’s the reality, and it’s irreversible. It’s sad.”