Avalanches slow glacier melting finds Swiss study

Avalanches play an important role in the survival of many glaciers. In some regions, more than one fifth of the snow covering them comes from avalanches, according to a new global analysis by Swiss researchers. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox "I would never have imagined that this effect would be so pronounced on a global scale," said Marin Kneib, researcher at the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL), quoted in a statement on Wednesday. For the first time, researchers have estimated - for all of the more than 200,000 glaciers scattered across the planet - how much avalanches contribute to snow accumulation and thus to their mass balance, which is the difference between ice accumulation and melting. According to the survey, published in the open-access scientific journal Nature Communications, along the Alps about 11% of glacier snow comes from avalanches; in the eastern Himalayas the share rises to 19%, and in New Zealand it even ...