The deputy head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Innsbruck received the award on Monday in Vienna for communicating her scientific work, in which she has been demonstrating the massive melting of glaciers in the Alps for years. With this election, which is being held for the 30th time this year, the Club of Education and Science Journalists wants to honor the efforts of scientists to make their work and their subject understandable to a broad public. This is also intended to increase awareness of the importance of research.
“Communicate research results in an understandable way”
The head of the ÖAW research group “Human-Environment Relationships, High Mountains” and her team are “concerned with communicating our research results in an understandable way because we have the feeling that something very unusual is happening here: climate change can be seen in the glaciers most drastic, best and most intuitive,” Fischer told APA. When you see pictures of glacier retreat and hear reports regarding it, “you immediately understand that there are things going on here that we should pay attention to.”
“Messages from glaciers are important”
These “messages from the glaciers” are important because “we in the very developed countries are of course among the main causes of climate change and also have the necessary resources to develop methods and take a pioneering role to limit climate change,” said the glaciologist , whose work is also received by international media, from the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” to the “Guardian” to the “Washington Post”. The award shows her that the things she and her team are trying to say are being heard by people.
Ten years ago, Fischer said no to the question of whether she saw a danger that the glaciers would disappear completely. She now assumes that this will be the case in the Eastern Alps as early as 2050. The reason for this is the “strongly changed dynamics of global warming”. As a result, “the melting occurs not only on the surface, but also to the same extent on the subsoil. The glaciers are undermined over a large area, the meltwater and the warm air flowing through double the melting rates.”
Image: EXPA/JOHANN GRODER (APA/EXPA/JOHANN GRODER)
Glaciers are changing rapidly
The change is happening rapidly: “When I started measuring glaciers, we didn’t find any meltwater even in September at midday. Now we’re standing at the glacier in November and it’s dripping.” The high temperatures would penetrate the rock to such an extent that deeper layers would thaw and large-scale rockfall and rockfall activities would occur. “These are completely new processes, the effects of which we cannot yet predict 100 percent, and we really have to look closely at them,” says the former national ice climbing champion and enthusiastic mountain athlete, who in 2020 was the subject of her research together with the photographer Bernd Ritschel documented the book “Alpine glacier – homage to the high alpine world of ice and snow – before it disappears” (Tyrolia).
Just as it was impossible to imagine glacier melting on the current scale for a long time, there might also be “effects in the entire climate system that we don’t yet know regarding. And that should make us particularly cautious,” emphasized the scientist of the year. It’s not just regarding limiting greenhouse gas emissions to curb the rise in temperature, “but also regarding what adaptation measures we need to take now in order to continue to live well in the Alps, which are a very sensitive area when it comes to natural hazards.”
Saving climate history by drilling for ice cores
With the melting of the glaciers, a unique climate archive that goes back 6,000 years is also being lost, because various clues to the previous climate can be found trapped in the ice. Fischer and her colleagues are therefore trying to extract ice cores from the shrinking glaciers in intensive drilling operations and thus save this frozen data on climate history.
Image: EXPA/JOHANN GRODER (APA/EXPA/JOHANN GRODER)
Given the importance of the topic, it seems surprising that the long-standing glacier measurements in Austria are largely carried out on a voluntary basis by committed individuals or on a club basis. In the middle of the 19th century, when the Hydrographic Services and the Central Institute for Metrology and Geodynamics were founded, glaciology was forgotten, “and we haven’t caught up with that to this day.” There is not a single publicly funded permafrost measurement in this country. The permafrost sometimes reaches up to 1,200 meters above sea level, which means that the settlement area is also threatened by its thawing. Fischer therefore considers it “very important that we put research on a healthier footing and find basic funding for the various series of measurements.”
In recent years, the ecologist Franz Essl (2022), the complexity researcher Peter Klimek (2021), the virologist Elisabeth Puchhammer (2020), the historian Barbara Stelzl-Marx (2019) and the chemist Nuno Maulide (2018) have received the award.
