For years the German’s have been protecting their highest peak, the Zugspitz, by spreading reflective foil tarps over the ski slopes. They believe this “sun screen” of sorts will fight against “global warming.”
"The cover keeps off the heat and channels away rainwater," said Manfred Haas, who manages a team that grooms the ski area with bulldozers and graders. "Every autumn we make note of where the glacier has melted the most and cover those places the following spring."
Only the ski area on the mountain is covered with tarps
The German’s believe covering up glacial areas can highly reduce melting. But they also know that this is not very practical Now they've come up wih a wind screen.
"Geographer Hans-Joachim Fuchs in the western German city Mainz has another idea. He wants to harness the power of cold mountain winds -- so-called kabatic winds, or streams of cold, dense air that flow downhill -- with windscreens. The screens would keep the cool air on top of the glaciers, perhaps preserving them for a little while longer.
Fuchs has been proposing this idea for years, and this week he's putting it to the test. On Monday, Fuchs and 27 students headed to the Rhone glacier in Switzerland to install a windscreen measuring 15 meters long (50 feet) and 3 meters high at an elevation of 2,300 meters (7,545 feet) on the leading edge of the glacier. He'll be measuring the effectiveness of the screen to see if it's a viable solution."
Click on the picture to see a photo slide show of Fuchs and his students :
Read the full article about Fuchs and what a glaciolgist has to say
HERE
Don't you wish you could have a job like that?
"Windscreen Could Save Glaciers?" Covers over the ski slopes? There's a lot of crazy stuff going on that most of us have never heard about. I'll be waiting to hear the results of this colossal experiment. That's if a giant gust of mountain wind doesn't knock over the screen first.
