Experts Are Worried After Bright Pink Water Flowed Down Swiss Alps During an Experiment

During late August this year, Getty Images photographer Sean Gallup (@seangallup) turned lucky as he got a chance to spend time with the glaciology professor Daniel Farinotti and his team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), who were studying the properties of the Rhone Glacier, the source of the 500-mile-long Rhone River that flows in France. One of the photos he captured from the expedition shows a giant crevasse in the Swiss Alps. What seems unusual is a stream of pink-colored liquid dribbling from between its ash-colored cliff. This pink liquid, Gallup explained, was a "visual aid to assess the water's rate of flow."

Led by Farinotti, the expedition involved him and his team lumbering through the crevasses, fissures, and cracks in the dirty blue ice of the Rhone Glacier. The objective was to study factors like “mass loss and surface reflectivity, ice flow, ice thickness, hydrological characteristics, and the size and deformation of crevasses,” Gallup explained in the Instagram post. The team, at first, erected a pole with a GPS receiver and a solar panel.

Looming more than 500 feet on either side of the ice, the granite mountainsides caught Farinotti’s attention. “In 1850, the glacier was flush with those ridges,” he told NPR. Gallup added that the flood filled the valley in front of a hotel built for glacier tourists. The building, no longer a hotel, is still standing. "Where we are standing, we are losing several meters of ice a year," he added. "Maybe 5 or 6 meters in thickness, and in terms of length, it's like dozens of meters a year. That's 2, 3, 4% of the glacier each year." He estimated that if climate change continued to accelerate at this pace, there would be no ice left by 2100.

Students prepared a hand-held penetrating radar. A tethered student peered into a "moulin," a shaft created by meltwater into the ice that was likely over 150 meters deep. The blue meltwater dripping from the crevices reminded them how the European Alps have warmed twice as much as the global average, disproportionately affecting their glaciers and leading to a sharp acceleration of ice loss over recent decades. Holding a bottle of a salt solution, Michelle Dreifuss explained, "First of all, we put a salt dilution in the stream there, and then we have two measuring points where we measure the salt concentration, and with that we can examine how much water is coming in a time period."

The pink color was added as a visual element for visiting photographers and art-loving travellers. The pink river cascading through the crevasse enabled Farinotti and his team to assess the intensity of climate change as experienced by the glacier. "Glaciers have become a bit of a symbol of climate change just because they are so powerful in visualizing the change," Farinotti told NPR.

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