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Germany's highest mountain, the country's last glacier, is melting away despite Herculean efforts to counter the effects of climate change.
Spreading giant anti-glare shields over the glacier each April after piling tonnes of loose snow upon it, workers at the Zugspitzebahn cable car operator are fighting a losing
battle to keep their glacier alive - for business and ecology reasons.
"We're doing all we can to preserve it as long as possible, but I'm not God and there's only so much we can do," said Frank Huber, the manager of cable car and skiing operations on the 2962m peak in the northern Alps.
"I grew up with the glacier and it's sad to think one day my children's children won't know what it feels or looks like."
The effort to stave off the demise of the Zugspitze is considerable, but begs the question why Germany, the world's sixth-largest producer of greenhouse gases, does not do more to tackle the cause of the problem.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel often cites the Zugspitze's state - predicting the national treasure may be gone within 20 years - as an argument for the industrial world to take bolder action against climate change.
As an early warning "global thermometer", glaciers are extremely sensitive to climate change. One of the world's most threatened eco-systems, they have been shrinking since the start of the industrial age.
Their retreat has gathered pace in the last quarter-century. The Zugspitze was 80m thick in 1910. Now it is only 45m thick.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations, has said glaciers are endangered: "Small alpine glaciers will disappear while larger glaciers will suffer a volume reduction between 30 per cent and 70 per cent by 2050."
The melting of the frozen ice is more than just the loss of picturesque mountain scenery. Without glaciers, scientists say summertime water levels in European rivers would drop. Much of the Rhine River water in the summer comes from glacier melting.
For the last 14 years at Zugspitze, Huber and his staff have spread a giant tarpaulin to deflect the sun, keep the surface cool and shield it from the corrosive warm summer rain. The operators say it will preserve 30,000 cu m of snow - roughly equivalent to a football-field-sized building that is one-storey high.
"The shield helps slow the process," said Huber. "But that and all the other things we're doing are only going to slow the process down a little bit. We aren't going to be able to save it."
During the winter, workers also use explosives to set off controlled avalanches on surrounding slopes to push snow on to the glacier. They put up rows of fences - as farmers do - on especially exposed parts to slow wind erosion.
Some critics say this is a waste of time and money, especially as the tarpaulin covers only a relatively small section of the glacier. Its main aim is to preserve the ski area and the Zugspitze as a glacier for marketing reasons, they say.
"The coverings won't save the glacier because they shield only a small area for winter sport," said Markus Weber, meteorologist and glacier expert at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. "It's expensive and the impact is limited."
- REUTERS
