The Snow-Capped Alps Are Going Green

The renowned snow-capped peaks of the Alps are fading quick and being replaced by vegetation cover– a procedure called “greening” that is predicted to increase climate change, a study said Thursday.

The research, released in Science, was based on 38 years of satellite images throughout the entirety of the iconic European mountain range.

“We were astonished, honestly, to discover such a big trend in greening,” first author Sabine Rumpf, an ecologist at the University of Basel, told AFP.

Greening is a well-known phenomenon in the Arctic. However, until now, it had not been well established on a vast scale in mountainous areas.

Given that both the poles and mountains are heating faster than the remainder of the world, scientists suspected comparable effects.

For their analysis, the team studied regions at 1,700 meters above sea level to rule out areas used for agriculture. They also ruled out forested areas and glaciers.

According to the discoveries, which covered 1984-2021, snow cover was no longer present in summer in virtually 10 percent of the area studied.

Rumpf mentioned that satellite images could only verify the existence or absence of snow, but the first effect of warming is reducing the snowpack’s depth, which cannot be seen from space.

The scientists compared the amount of vegetation using wavelength analysis to identify the quantity of chlorophyll present and found plant growth increased throughout 77 percent of the zone examined.

Vicious cycle

Greening takes place in 3 different ways: plants start growing in areas they previously were not present, grow taller and more densely due to favorable conditions, and ultimately certain species growing typically at lower altitudes move into higher areas.

“Climate change is driving these changes,” said Rumpf.

“Warming implies that we have much longer vegetation periods. We have more benign conditions that promote plant growth, so plants can simply grow more and quicker,” she added.

The result is additive: “The warmer it gets, the more precipitation drops as rainfall instead of snow.”

As well as, there are several harmful effects.

A large portion of drinking water comes from thawing snow. If water is not stored as snow, it vanishes quicker through rivers.

Afterward, the habitat species adapted specifically to the alpine environment are interrupted.

The snow’s disappearance additionally harms the tourism industry, a key economic driver for the region.

“We often tend to forget the emotional aspects of these procedures that the Alps are like an extremely famous symbol, and when people think about Switzerland, it is typically the Alps that they think of,” stressed Rumpf.

While alpine greening could raise carbon sequestration, feedback loops are most likely to cause a net result of intensified warming and thawing of permafrost, the researchers suggest.

 Snow reflects about 90 percent of solar radiation, and vegetation takes in a lot more and emits the energy back in the form of heat, which further hastens warming, snow melt, and more vegetation: a vicious cycle.

From green to brown?

The future of the Alps cannot be predicted with certainty.

“In terms of snow, it is pretty straightforward,” stated Rumpf. “I would expect the snow cover to go away more and more, especially at lower elevations.”

For the time being, a different phenomenon called “browning”– in which the ground is no longer covered with snow or vegetation– has just been spotted in less than one percent of the area examined.

This is far less than what has been observed in the Arctic or the mountains of Central Asia.

It is driven by two factors: the rise in episodes of extreme rain followed by droughts and a decrease in water available to plants produced by annual snowmelt.

“We do not know for the future whether browning is going to take place more and more,” concluded Rumpf, who wants to repeat the observations in a few years.

Read the original article on PHYS.

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