Alpine climbing routes crumble as climate change strikes
JULY 25, 2019
by Gersende Rambourg
High up in the natural wonder of the French Alps, the climbers who spend their days among the rockfaces and glaciers have come to a grim conclusion: the mountains are falling down around them.
In the Mont Blanc range, a magnet for mountaineers in the summer, many popular routes up or through the peaks have become too dangerous to take because of the risk of falling debris.
"It's going quickly. Ten years ago, I'd have never thought that it would accelerate like this," said Ludovic Ravanel, an academic at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc who has been studying major rockfalls in the area.
"And if you look at the predictions from my climatologist colleagues, for the next 10 to 20 years, it's only going to get worse," he told AFP.
More:
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-alpine-climbing-routes-crumble-climate.html
