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CANADA

Searchers find body of French snowmobiler who crashed through ice

Canadian searchers on Friday found the body of one of five French snowmobilers whose machines fell through the ice of a frozen lake, police said.

Searchers find body of French snowmobiler who crashed through ice
Canadian police searching for the bodies on snowmobiles. Photo: HO / Sûreté du Québec / AFP
A spokesman acknowledged that the chances of finding the group alive had dimmed, but police were “keeping up hope” of recovering their bodies.
   
The search for the snowmobilers includes divers, sonar operators and police backed by helicopters in the area about 225 kilometers (140 miles) north of Quebec City, and is expected to resume again at daybreak.
   
Quebec provincial police spokesman Hugues Beaulieu said the body discovered Friday “was found more than two kilometers from the initial search area in Grande Decharge River” at the mouth of Lake Saint-Jean where the accident happened.
   
“At the moment, we can't identify the body,” French Consul General in Quebec Laurent Barbot said during a press briefing. “The process is underway and the families have of course been informed,” he added.
   
The group included eight French tourists, who were snowmobiling Tuesday evening in an area that is off limits to snowmobiles because the ice is thinner there.
   
Three snowmobilers survived with minor injuries. They returned to France on Thursday evening, according to the consulate.
   
Their 42-year-old Canadian guide died on Wednesday in a hospital after trying to rescue members of the group.
   
Police have recovered six snowmobiles at the bottom of the lake near where the accident occurred, and provincial authorities have pledged to tighten safety measures on the use of the machines.
   
Investigators do not know why the group left the approved paths to venture “off-piste” at nightfall, but some experts believe they may have been trying to take a shortcut to their destination.

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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.

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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