There is a dialogue in Europe regarding the building of a tramway, if you will, connecting Grindelwald and the top of Mt. Eiger. But, my interest is different. The Mt. Eiger glaciers and ice within it's rock has been melting with a very different result than normally thought about melting ice.
March 24, 2017
By Kozo Yamamura
...One morning, (click here) shortly after dawn, we were awoken by thunderous noises coming from the direction of the Eiger. Startled, we looked toward the mountain and saw a huge, grey dust cloud rising high into the sky from the edge of the mountain next to the glacier’s path. Tons of rock, including gigantic boulders, along with an immense quantity of gravel and dirt, were cascading down toward the river valley. In no time, the dust cloud drifted over the village, obscuring the houses. The noise and the avalanche of rocks and dirt gradually stopped and, as the dust cloud dissipated, we could see that a stalagmite-like rock column as high as the Empire State building that once stood at the edge of Eiger was gone forever...
As stated in the article there were rock slides affiliated with Eiger and it's glaciers. These rock slides were facilitated by heat. Silly, you say? Not. The ice formations hold the rocks in place. The water seeped into the crevasses a long time ago and maintained the integrity of the mountain ever since.
Today, because of the climate crisis, mountains like Eiger lose rock regularly because of melting ice in the spaces between the rocks themselves. This film of Eiger shows rubble at the bottom of the mountain. This is the rubble that falls when the ice melts.
This diffusely understood ice formations is the error in calculations about the rapidity of the heating of Earth. There is no solid way to know exactly the amount of ice vs. rock in these mountains. It is best measured as mountain water runoff. The difficulty there is being sure the amount of rain is measured as well to find the sincere loss of ancient ice.
