The winds are cold at any time of year on Germany’s highest mountain, but 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 tons of loose snow upon it, workers are fighting a losing battle to keep the Zugspitze glacier alive — for business and ecological 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 9,718-foot 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 instead.

In her speeches, 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 ecosystems, they have been shrinking since the start of the industrial age. Their retreat has gathered speed in the last quarter century. The Zugspitze was 260 feet thick in 1910; now it is only 150.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the UN, has said glaciers are endangered: “Small Alpine glaciers will disappear, while larger glaciers will suffer a volume reduction between 30 and 70 percent 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 glacial 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 shield, expanded this year by 50 percent to 30,000 square feet, is supposed to preserve almost 100,000 cubic feet of snow — roughly equivalent to a football-field-sized building one story high.

“The shield helps slow the process,” said Huber. “It reflects the sun and helps ice form beneath it. 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 use explosives to set off controlled avalanches on surrounding slopes to push snow onto the glacier. They erect rows of fences on especially exposed parts to slow wind erosion.

Some critics say this is a waste of time and money, especially as the tarpaulin only covers 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. About 500,000 tourists take the cable-car or cog rail car to the peak from the village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen each year.

Huber said that as a result of climate change, they stopped gouging halfpipes for snowboarders into the glacier. They lost customers in the process, but he said the alternative was worse.

“We realized if we kept digging the halfpipes, the glacier might be gone in 10 rather than 20 years,” he said.

Courtesy of Reuters. © Street News Service: www.street-papers.org