Out of the Dark
Normally, he stands on summits. That it first goes into the dark depths was a new alpinistic experience even for Dani Arnold. Follow Dani on his adventure to the bottom of the Plaine Morte glacier and back to daylight with an ice axe.
A glacier is not a compact mass of ice. Well-known and feared are the crevasses: if you traverse one over a snow bridge, the darkness below gives you an idea that it could go on here. But as soon as you have passed the crevasses, you have already forgotten the mysterious underworld. So far, this has also been the case for Dani Arnold. Yet ice is his world - and where else can you find an environment made entirely of ice?
After the speleologists Fred Bétrisey and Hervé Krummenacher made their ice cave exploration on the Plaine Morte accessible to the Tages-Anzeiger and thus to the public, Dani Arnold's interest was also aroused. The largest plateau glacier in the Alps practically does not flow and has no crevasses except on its northern tongue. On the one hand, this makes the Plaine Morte an unspectacular glacier without crevasse zones. On the other hand, it also means that there are fewer stresses in the ice than in a strongly flowing glacier - thus less danger of collapse. This allows the relatively safe descent through glacial mills, where millions of liters of meltwater rush down in summer.
When we set off in mid-December, we are nevertheless skeptical - because a lot of snow has already fallen. Many of the entrance holes are blocked. Only in one place does it look as if the snow has not yet completely sealed up. Dani cautiously ventures towards the halfway snowed-in hole. A dark shaft opens up in front of him. For the first time, this glacier mill is accessible, say Fred and Hervé, who know the Plaine Morte like no one else. We rope down about 50 meters vertically - to a place where not a soul has ever been. At the bottom, the passages continue horizontally: we crawl in narrow shafts along the paths that the meltwater creates here in summer - when suddenly we come across rock. The fact that we encounter bedrock already at a relatuv low depth of around 60 meters is surprising. "If you consider that the glaciers lose meters of thickness every year, it probably won't be long before you can walk here in sneakers," says Dani.
The Plaine Morte is up to 200 meters thick, how fast you hit the bedrock also depends on the topography under the ice. Elsewhere, you can follow the path through the glacial mills 100 meters below the surface, this has only been done by Fred and Hervé so far. And there, they say, is not the end of the line, so the bedrock is even deeper. But getting around can then mean swimming through water-filled passages in diving suits.
But the way to the surface is waiting for us: steep ice climbing in ice as hard as a pimple. An ice climbing tour that looks different every year - and above all gets shorter. Because the Plaine Morte is one of the fastest melting Swiss glaciers. As the largest plateau glacier in the Alps, it has no nourishing area and the winter snow no longer survives the summer. By 2100, according to calculations by glaciologists at the University of Fribourg, the eternal ice should have disappeared.
Text: Dominik Osswald
Images: Severin Karrer