Every year, the Swiss cover melting glaciers with a white blanket

The huge white blanket covering the Rhone Glacier in the Swiss Alps is not a comforting courtesy but a means of keeping the ice cold. Urs Flueeler/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock)

Summer is just around the corner, which means that soon, it will be time to stuff the glaciers

Like every year, a batch The Swiss will drag a giant white blanket across the mountains to the R?n Glacier. As E&E News reported in a recent article on geoengineering, the annual hike is part of a doomed effort to protect the giant ice mass from rising summer temperatures.

The earth is warming, and glaciers around the world are retreating and shrinking. As Live Science previously reported, humans appear to have caused 69% of the melting of glaciers between 1991 and 2010, with climate warming only accelerating in the past eight years. In Rh?ne,

's shrinking represents an economic emergency as well as an environmental emergency. This piece of ice that covered a large area of ??Switzerland 11,500 years ago is an important tourist attraction; Agence France-Presse reported in 2015 that since 1870, an "ice cave" has been carved into the ice every year for tourists to walk through. and threatened by shrinking ice. The glacier has retreated 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) since 1856.

These blankets, their white color used to reflect light before striking the ice, may be slowing Decline of glaciers. But they won't stop it. Glaciologist David Walken told AFP that glaciers can still lose 3 to 5 inches (10 to 12 centimeters) in hot weather.

Still, the idea is similar to other The idea is becoming increasingly popular, as it becomes increasingly clear that the goal of limiting the worst impacts of climate change set by policymakers will be achieved as global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius. According to a 2013 study published in the journal Science, if the world's glaciers completely collapse, the potential for global sea level rise is huge. Ocean Depth reports that at a December 2017 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, scientists seriously considered proposals such as laying a giant layer of inland polar ice. of reflective material, building huge mounds on the ocean floor to prevent warm water from touching melting glaciers, or pumping large amounts of seawater onto sea ice in the summer to increase its mass.

All of these ideas and more appear in an ongoing series on geoengineering E&E, which Live Science recommends reading in full.

Originally published on Live Science.