A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhone glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

“Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Porter said in a viral post on social media platform X on Sunday night.

  • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    I’m sure a lot of the comments on other platforms would say something along the lines of “They obviously took one picture in the summer and one in the winter… 😒 But enjoy your antifa money 🤣🤣🤣”

  • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
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    3 months ago

    I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there’s a sign “the glacier was here in 1910” and that’s where tourists back then.

    To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there’s several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it’s really far away.

    Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted…

    • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I first went in 2013, you had to climb down quite a long flight of steps to get to it.

      Went this summer, and there’s an actual gondola 🚡 to take you down to it, then 400 steps down after that

      Actually horrifying

  • Destide@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    Yeah, we’ll deal with it when it affects us personally! Not like nature will just brush us away…right?

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Reminds me of an economist who was telling everyone that a few degrees of climate change would barely cost 1% of economic growth so it would not be an issue at all. The climate scientists replied that at -4°C there was a mile of ice at the spot he was sitting and you would think that this would surely affect the economy, and that +4°C would have similar results.

  • Imperor@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Don’t worry. Some people I know can still go skiing, so clearly it’s all fake and a non-issue.

  • volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Everyone in this sub agrees that climate change is a disastrous event, and that we’re not doing enough. But as soon as you suggest changing to a system that actually may do something against it, you guys drop the t-word like there’s no tomorrow.

  • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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    3 months ago

    My dad thinks climate change is a scam and “someone 8s making a lot of money from it”

    My dad also laments that the local lake doesn’t freeze over like it did when he was a teenager, DRIVING on top of it with his brothers.

    Totally unrelated to climate change though. Cause that’s totes fake.

    Also storms are more violent and frequent, winters are basically spring 2.0 now and the local river has flooded way past historic levels and could threaten the downtown area of their city within the decade.

    But all that is SOOOOOOO unrelated.

    • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      He is partially right - there are people making a lot of money from climate change… Or at least from causing it

      • Amanda@aggregatet.org
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        3 months ago

        That’s capitalism for you: one company makes money creating the problem and another fixing it! It’s double-pumped!

      • greenskye@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        To be fair there are also a lot of ‘green’ company scams out there too. Grifters are everywhere

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      The cognitive dissonance is so strange to me. I’m a native Cheesehead and it’s a well documented fact that ice fishing season in Wisconsin is quickly getting shorter and shorter due to the higher winter temperatures.

      Maybe it’s a branding issue. What if we start referring to “climate change” as “demise of ice fishing” or “imminent collapse of the snowmobile industry”?

      • P1nkman@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        imminent collapse of the snow industry

        That should make the tourism industry get their lobbying straight.

    • deleted@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      While I think climate change is a real issue and we need to do something about it, I can see the rationale behind your dad’s thoughts and childhood memories.

      Is the planet getting hotter is one thing and was it caused by humans is another thing.

  • MagicCuboid@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Chasing Ice remains a terrific documentary that clearly showed all of this happening 15 years ago.

  • Amanda@aggregatet.org
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    3 months ago

    the post also attracted a steady stream of comments from climate denying-accounts subscribed to X’s premium service, many of which were abusive and misrepresented established climate science

    My god