"We're almost a month ahead": in the Alps, water and snow are already lacking

The snowfield that usually supplies water to her 60-person refuge already looks "a bit like what we should have at the end of July, beginning of August. We're almost a month ahead of the snow melt," laments Noémie Dagan. However, the refuge, which has no cistern, is operating on a just-in-time basis. If the water runs out, it is forced to close: this already happened once in mid-August 2023. Noémie Dagan hopes to get through this year with her two other catchments, including an "emergency" one, a kilometer of plastic pipes installed at the cost of great human effort to collect water from a glacier near the Pic de la Grave.

But the steep and unstable slopes over which the pipe was laid are vulnerable to the "increasingly violent" storms that are ravaging the massif. The Dauphiné Tourist Society, which owns the refuge, is considering more sustainable solutions but lacks resources, says Noémie Dagan. Having been in the business for about fifteen years, she says she has seen "the glaciers and the high mountains transform."

However, "the glaciers are our water towers […]. I think we are really a kind of sentinels who have a view of the impacts to come," she emphasizes. Thomas Boillot, a high mountain guide who has been a long-time visitor to the Écrins, never thought he would see water problems appear in the refuges: "It had never crossed our minds," he says. And yet cases are multiplying "and there will certainly be others," lists Thomas Boillot.

Some snowfields, once eternal, are melting in summer, precipitation is becoming scarce, and glaciers are changing shape as they melt, disrupting the supply of water to refuges. Where water previously arrived "by gravity" thanks to reserves of snow and ice upstream, in the future it will have to be pumped from below, explains Thomas Boillot. Scientists estimate that climate change is almost twice as significant in the Alps as it is globally, and that there will be almost no glaciers left in France by 2100.

The year 2025 also promises to be a perilous one for Switzerland's 1,400 glaciers , where accumulated snow and ice melted five to six weeks earlier than usual, according to authorities. Xavier Cailhol, a doctoral student in environmental sciences and mountain guide, has just returned from the Mont Blanc massif, where he also witnessed the "brutal" impact of the heatwave.

"I started June by skiing down Mont Blanc with 40 cm of powder. And I finished it on completely exposed glaciers, even up to the Aiguille du Midi, up to 3,700 m," he says, pointing out that the layer of snow protects the ice by reflecting the sun's rays. "Above 3,200 meters, it's drier than we've ever seen, including 2022. So yes, it's still quite worrying for the rest of the summer," says Xavier Cailhol.