Vanishing giants The loss to nature as Switzerland's great glaciers retreat

From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps.

- Katherine Hill

From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps. The curved finger of ice, rumpled like tissue, cuts between high buttresses of granite and gneiss. Now it has melted out of sight.

People here once feared the monstrous ice streams, describing them as devils, but now they dread their disappearance. Like other glaciers in the Alps and globally, the Fiesch is melting at ever-increasing rates. More than ice is lost when the giants disappear: cultures, societies and entire ecosystems are woven around the glaciers.

The neighbouring Great Aletsch, like the Fiesch, flows from the high plateau between the peaks of the Jungfrau-Aletsch, a Unesco region in the Swiss canton of Valais and Europe's longest glacier. It is receding at a rate of more than 50 metres a year, but from the cable car above it remains a mighty sight.

Clouds scud across the sky and shafts of light marble the ice. On the rocky slopes leading down to the glacier from the ridge, there are pools of aquamarine brilliance, the ground speckled with startling alpine flowers. The ice feels alive, with waterfalls plunging into deep crevasses and rocks shimmering in the sun.

"It's just so diverse, these harsh mountains and ice, and up the ridge, a totally different habitat," says Maurus Bamert, the director of the environmental education centre Pro Natura Aletsch. "This is really special."

Many of the living worlds in the ice and snow are not visible to the human eye. "You don't expect a living organism on the ice," Bamert says. But there is a rich ice-loving biotic community and surprising biodiversity. Springtails or "glacier fleas" survive on the snow's crust. But there are also algae, bacteria, fungi and ice worms, as well as spiders and beetles.