It is one of Switzerland’s most picturesque ski resorts. But over the past two decades the Gurschen glacier above the village of Andermatt has been melting, forcing locals at the beginning of every ski season to build an artificial snow ramp.
Now, however, the resort’s organisers have come up with a novel way of protecting their mountain from global warming — they have wrapped it in clingfilm.
On Wednesday workmen were putting the finishing touches to a 2 500sq metre plastic sheet which has been wrapped over a stretch of ice used by skiers to get from the cable-car station to the mountain’s ski-routes.
The idea was to stop the ice melting during the summer season, organisers explained. ”We have lots of snow. The problem isn’t with the snow but with the ice. It melts in the summer,” a spokesperson for the resort, Andermatt Gotthard Sportbahnen AG, said.
”Up until now we have been building an artificial ramp at the beginning of each winter season, but this is a lot of effort. The sheet should stop the ice from melting.”
The move has been controversial. Greenpeace in Switzerland staged its own protest on the mountain as the sheet was pegged into place, unveiling placards with the slogans: ”Reduce CO2” and ”Climate protection now”.
Experts at Zurich University recently estimated that Swiss glaciers had lost about a fifth of their surface area in the past 15 years. In that time, the 2 961m high Gurschen glacier has sunk by 20m.
Over the past two years the permafrost in several Swiss mountains has also started melting, threatening the foundations of cable cars with collapse.
On Wednesday a spokesperson for Greenpeace in Switzerland said that using a ”fleece” to stop a mountain from melting was absurd. ”This is just one of thousands of symptoms of climate change,” Alexander Hauri, a climate campaigner for Swiss Greenpeace said.
”Covering the mountain in a sheet is tackling the symptoms of climate change rather than the problem. What we want is for politicians to do something about it by introducing taxation on CO2 emissions.”
A spokesperson for WWF added wryly: ”The climate catastrophe has now even reached one of the richest places in Switzerland.”
Andermatt is one of Switzerland’s smaller Alpine resorts, but has long been popular with experienced skiers who set off from the Gemsstock mountain on various routes down the shimmering surrounding valley.
The resort’s organisers said the sheet had cost â,¬62 000 and would be removed in the autumn. Scientists in Austria had successfully tested a similar sheet last summer, they said. – Guardian Unlimited Â