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MISSING

Skier found drowned after falling through ice

The body of a 60-year-old man was found in the hole of a frozen sea inlet in Umeå, northern Sweden, a day after he went missing.

Published: 13 January 2013 10:39 CET

The man went skiing on the frozen Mjölefjärden inlet about 20 kilometres south of Umeå at lunchtime on Saturday.

Police received a call at around 3pm, yet the man’s body wasn’t recovered until Sunday morning after a massive search operation.

The police used search dogs, scooters and a helicopter to find the missing man, with sea rescue services and the coastal guard involved, too.

Overnight, the temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees Celsius.

The man had apparently drowned in a hole in the ice about 450 metres from the shore.

The inlet had reportedly only been frozen for a couple of days when the man ventured out on it.

A local police officer riding a scooter noticed ski tracks on the ice and followed them until he was no longer sure that the ice would hold.

At that point he notified the coastal guard, who took over the search using a hovercraft.

Further out, near a hole in the ice, the search team found some of the man’s belongings and later his body was found inside the hole.

“It is very tragic”, Simon Wormö, the local police commander, told Sveriges Radio (SR).

Wormö explained that the ice was on the edge of open waters and that ice holes can emerge at any time of the day, depending on weather conditions.

In windy weather, snow can blow over and cover the holes, making the territory treacherous and risky.

Wormö recommended skiers and ice skaters to keep as close to land as possible and not to venture far out on sea ices.

The 60-year-old’s family has been notified of his death.

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CLIMATE

Germany could ‘lose last glaciers in 10 years’

Germany's glaciers are melting at a faster pace than feared and the country could lose its last ice caps in 10 years, an alarming report said Thursday.

Published: 29 April 2021 16:05 CEST
Germany could 'lose last glaciers in 10 years'
The glacier on Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze, covered in snow. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Sina Schuldt

“The days of glaciers in Bavaria are numbered. And even sooner than expected,” said Thorsten Glauber, environment minister of the southern region, home to Germany’s ice-capped Alps.

“The last Bavarian Alpine glacier could be gone in 10 years.” Scientists had previously estimated the glaciers would be around until the middle of the century.

But the melting has accelerated dramatically over the last years. Located in the Zugspitze area and in the Berchtesgaden Alps, Germany’s five glaciers have lost about two-thirds of their volume in the past decade.

Their surface areas have also shrunk by a third – equivalent to around 36 football fields.

Issuing a stark warning over global warming, Glauber stressed that the glaciers are “not only a monument of Earth’s history in the form of snow and ice”.

“They are thermometers for the state of our climate,” he added.

A global study released Wednesday found nearly all the world’s glaciers are losing mass at an ever increasing pace, contributing to more than a fifth of global sea level rise this century.

An international team of researchers analysing images taken by a NASA satellite said that between 2000-2019, the world’s glaciers lost an average of 267 billion tonnes of ice each year — enough to submerge Switzerland under six metres of water every year.

The report came as meteorologists in Germany said this April has been the coldest in four decades.

Like elsewhere in Europe, Germany has recorded wild weather in recent years. After a winter in which temperatures plunged well below freezing in February, the mercury rose to 25.9 degrees on April 1 before slipping more than 15 degrees for much of the rest of the month.

Environmentalists blame global warming for the shifts and have been urging governments to do more to halt the damaging trend.

READ ALSO: How Germany is reacting to top court’s landmark ruling

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement countries aim to keep the global temperature increase to under two degrees Celsius, and ideally closer to 1.5 degrees, by 2050.

Climate activists scored a landmark victory Thursday in a case against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government as the Constitutional Court ruled Berlin’s environment protection plan insufficient.

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