"Brunnenkogel Ferner (Austrian word for glacier) is wrapped with a fleece-like cover to keep it from melting.  Workers uncovered rolls of the material and attached it to the top of the part of the glacier.  Covered ice melts slower. <br /> The ski area at 3,400 meters is covered to help save the ski industry since the glacier is retreating.  The cost of materials is one Euro per square meter.<br /> <br /> The Alpine glaciers -- in Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy -- are losing one percent of their mass every year and, even supposing no acceleration in that rate, will have all but disappeared by the end of the century. More hot, dry summers like that of 2003 in Europe, when the loss speeded to five percent, could cut the life expectancy to no more than 50 years, according to Wilfried Haeberli of the University of Zurich...""We estimate that by the end of the 21st century, with a medium-type climate scenario, about five percent of what existed in the 1970s will have survived, he added."
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