Top of Europe: The Finsteraarhorn–Jungfrau Glacier Landscape

The Finsteraarhorn, the highest peak in the Bernese Alps, and the Jungfrau, renowned for its cog railway that attracts a high number of tourists each year, are together in the heart of a high mountain glacier landscape. The Unteraar Glacier with an east-oriented and extensively debris-covered tongue has, since the eighteen/nineteenth century, been the cradle of glacier research (e.g. L. Agassiz). In turn, Lower Grindelwald Glacier became historically the best-documented Swiss valley glacier, thanks to its accessible, low-altitude ice-front position. A wealth of high-quality depictions by top artists (e.g. C. Wolf and S. Birmann) have allowed the reconstruction of the Little Ice Age (LIA) glacier fluctuations in a uniquely precise way. The Upper Lauterbrunnen Valley, dominated on both sides by huge steep rock walls with a great number of waterfalls, hosts smaller glaciers and a collection of moraines in the valley bottom. Since the end of the LIA, all the glaciers have been melting back, with a dramatic increase in recent years. The Lower Grindelwald Glacier, for instance, shows a reduction of the ice volume by 50 % since the end of the LIA. By the end of the twenty-first century, the Finsteraarhorn–Jungfrau landscape will no longer exist in the form it has been renowned for over the last centuries.