The Trift Glacier (german: Triftgletscher) is a long glacier (2005) in the Urner Alps near Gadmen, in the extreme east of the canton Berne in

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

Morphology

In 1973 glacier was 5.75 km long, 3 km wide at the top and around 500 m wide at it tongue. Overall it covered an area of including glacier sides.
Triftgletscher Gadmen, Schweizerisches Gletschermessnetz
Since the end of the

Little Ice Age The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. It was not a true ice age of global extent. The term was introduced into scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939. Ma ...

, the Trift Glacier is shrinking. The valley in which lake ''

Triftsee The Triftsee is a lake in the Urner Alps near Gadmen in the canton of Berne, Switzerland. It was formed recently (after 2001) by the melting of the lower part of Trift Glacier. See also *List of mountain lakes of Switzerland This is a list of ...

'' is today used to be filled by a large mass of ice well into the 20th century. In the 1990s small puddles of melt water began to form at the

glacier tongue An ice tongue is a long and narrow sheet of ice projecting out from the coastline. An ice tongue forms when a valley glacier moves very rapidly (relative to surrounding ice) out into the ocean or a lake. They can gain mass from water freezing ...

and gradually became larger. In the hot summer of 2003, the lake quickly grew and the glacier tongue sank into the melt water and dissolved in it, which led to a shrinkage of the glacier of more than 136 m within a year. Since 1861, the glacier has shrunk a total of 2771 meters.

Tourist attractions

At an altitude of 2520 meters above sea level is the '' Trifthutte '', a mountain hut of the '' Schweizer Alpen-Club (SAC) '' that was only accessible via the glacier tongue. Due to the melting of the glacier, in 2004 people were forced to build a bridge, the '' Triftbrücke '' to reach this hut.

References

External links

Swiss glacier monitoring network
Glaciers of the Alps Glaciers of the canton of Bern GTrift {{bern-glacier-stub