Drop by drop, Slovenia is losing its ice. The Skuta Glacier is now the last glacier left in the country. Its other glacier on Mount Triglav, Slovenia’s highest peak, has almost completely melted away.
Mountain guide Andrej Slak has watched Slovenia’s glaciers shrink for 35 years. Climbing over rocky terrain toward what remains of Skuta, he says the change has been especially noticeable over the past decade and that its impact on the local community has been devastating.
"We are standing next to Slovenia's last remaining glacier and just look at what is left of it – nothing but a small patch of ice covered in grit and debris; the change is striking.
"These glaciers serve as vital water reservoirs for us in the valley throughout the year. Shepherds used to utilise icy hollows like this to store and preserve meat, but they can no longer do that as such ice pockets are nowhere to be found in the mountains anymore."
What remains is a patch of ice on the surface of the mountainside, and the rest buried under stones, with a narrow opening leading into a crevasse.
How quickly is Slovenia’s last glacier shrinking?
In Ljubljana, scientists have been gathering data on the glaciers.
This year marks 80 years since the Anton Melik Geographical Institute at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts began monitoring both glaciers.
"When we started, there were about two and a half to three hectares of ice under Skuta. Now it has shrunk to 1.5 hectares, and ice has mostly thinned out. On Skuta, it has thinned from several tens of metres to just a few metres. Back when we started, the Triglav Glacier covered a little over 14 hectares. Later, five or 10 years ago, we were still talking about half a hectare to one hectare. In recent years, it has been less than 0.2 hectares, but the ice, as I said, has now completely disappeared," explains Miha Pavsek.
Pavsek says the change is due to a combination of two factors.
"The turning point comes when we have a combination of very little snow, meaning a very low maximum seasonal snow depth, followed by a very warm summer,” he says. “And those two factors coincided very well this year.”
On Skuta, a marker painted on a rock shows how high the glacier reached in 1994. The ice has pulled back from this point since then.
“Skuta is following the same path as the Triglav Glacier. The ice is now protected. We were in the mountains a week ago, and about 80 to 90 per cent of the ice surface is covered by gravel, which provides additional protection, but it melts from all sides," says Pavsek.
Glacier melt has knock on effects on rivers and groundwater
Gravel gives the ice’s surface some protection from the sun, but inside the cave beneath the ice, water falls from the ceiling.
The effects reach well beyond the mountains.
"The waters from the glaciers feed our great rivers, including the Drava, in Croatia, as well as the Mura, which originates in Austria. There, according to the latest forecasts, all glaciers below 3,500 metres will disappear by 2050. So, these rivers will have much less water. And normally, these rivers feed the groundwater, where we have wells and pumps for drinking water," explains Pavsek.
For hikers who still come to the mountain, the loss is easy to see.
"I am concerned about this from a broader perspective, specifically regarding climate change in general, because glaciers serve as a vital reserve of Earth's water," says Tanja Plavec, a local hiker. "As they disappear, that reserve disappears with them. Furthermore, glaciers host a unique ecosystem that also vanishes as the perennial ice disappears."
This year, Europe sweltered under an exceptionally hot and arid summer, the intensity of which scientists say would have been "virtually impossible" without climate change from humans' burning of fossil fuels.
The continent is the world’s fastest-warming, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.