Vanishing glacier on Germany’s highest peak prompts ski lift demolition

A ski slope down the Schneeferner glacier on the Zugspitze mountain has melted away, leading the lift operator to begin dismantling the structure after more than 50 years of service.

“The glaciers in Bavaria will inevitably melt away, as they can no longer survive in the face of climate change,” Christoph Mayer, a glaciologist at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, told AFP.

High-tension cables anchoring the existing ski lift were cut with blasting charges in Friday’s operation. The lift’s pylons, which were built on the ice, then fell and were dragged away through the snow by heavy machinery.

The peak of Zugspitze, which stands at 2,962 metres (9,700 feet), is located in the Wetterstein massif along Germany’s border with Austria.

“The ice is receding, the terrain and the lift have changed drastically,” said Laura Schaper, spokeswoman of the ski lift operator Bayerische Zugspitzbahn Bergbahn AG.

“The slope has become significantly steeper, and for that reason it’s no longer technically feasible to keep operating the lift.”

New data on the remaining glaciers in the Bavarian Alps released Thursday found that the glaciers have receded by more than a quarter just between 2023 and 2025, losing around one million cubic metres of ice.

Wilfried Hagg, a geologist at the Munich University of Applied Sciences who worked on the study alongside Mayer, told AFP that climate change is entirely to blame.

Hagg told AFP that there’s “absolutely no” chance of saving any of Germany’s remaining glaciers.

There are four remaining glaciers in Bavaria: the northern part of the Schneeferne and the Hoellentalferner, which is also located on the Zugspitze.

Two others are both located on the Berchtesgarden massif: the Wazmann, at 2,713 metres, and Blaueis at 2,607 metres.

Those glaciers “are in very bad shape,” Hagg said, with the two on Berchtesgarden “likely to disappear completely very soon -– this year or next”.

‘Absolutely doomed’

The northern Schneeferner glacier, where the lift was being demolished, could survive for a few more years but will vanish within the decade, Hagg said.

The nearby southern Schneeferner glacier was declared dead in 2022.

“That would leave one very last glacier on the Zugspitze, known as the Hoellentalferner, which is set to disappear in the 2030s,” Hagg said.

Already, summer melt far outpaces the winter snowfall even at the high elevation of the Zugspitze glaciers, according to Mayer and Hagg.

“Even under the most optimistic climate scenarios, or even if we could stop global warming immediately, they would disappear,” he said. “They’re absolutely doomed.”

According to the EU’s Copernicus climate observatory, the last three years have been the warmest ever recorded globally, due to increased greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming.

Globally, approximately 41 percent of total glacier loss occurred during the decade between 2015 and 2024, according to Earth System Science Data, which notes the greatest losses in Alaska, western North America and Central Europe.

The ski slopes of the Zugspitze are among the most popular in Germany, and for decades the ice of the glaciers has helped extend ski season on either side of winter by helping snow settle on the mountain.

Other lifts elsewhere on the Zugspitze peak will continue operating, but none will remain on the Schneeferner glacier once the demolition work begun on Friday is completed.

Hagg said the melting of the nearby Hoellentalferner glacier has also led to some rockslide and become more dangerous for climbers, as ice that once held boulders and rock walls in place melts away.