UKC

The Sphinx, a snow patch on Braeriach that was famous for decades for surviving year-round, has melted in recent days. This is the fourth consecutive year that it has completely vanished by autumn.

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In reply to UKC/UKH News:

Can't someone cover it up with a sheet or something to stop it melting?

In reply to UKC/UKH News:

Do any remain? I remember following the epic threads about enduring snow patches on the  winterhighland forums.

In reply to pasbury:

I think there's one on Aonach Beag that's just hanging on 

In reply to Lankyman:

sadly not a scalable solution to a changing climate!

In reply to James0101:

I did hear an interesting radio programme about hypothetically creating a bubble barrier in orbit that could partially shade an area of the Earth and thus potentially knock down warming by a couple of degrees. Clearly not an imminent prospect.

In reply to Lankyman:

Glacier farming is done in other parts of the world.  It’s on my todo list to research what it would take to farm a glacier in Scotland or at least boost snow retention. Snow fences to prevent the wind stripping it, spraying water at the right time to make ice layers to prevent wind scouring, potentially minimal quantities of solar powered snow making or moving snow to put clean white surfaces over dirty ones etc.

I used to be an avid follower of the Scottish highlands snow patch threads but they seemed to peter out.

There is a suggestion from thermoluminescence data that there could have been a glacier in the cairngorms 400 years ago but nobody has any human record of the location at the time.  

In reply to wintertree:

In my teens I was fascinated by a photo I saw in a book that showed what looked like to all intents and purposes a glacier in a Cairngorms corrie. The glacier had crevasses, a bergschrund and a terminal ice cliff. It was Coire an Lochain on the Great Slab I believe. Probably a thing of the past now.

In reply to Lankyman:

I remember seeing perhaps the same photo of the Great Slab in a book and having my mind blown.

In reply to kwoods:

Vague memory of seeing the same, or at least a similar, photo in an old SMC journal.

The academic article about a possible little ice age glacier in the Cairngorms was the subject of a thread on here a few years ago & I think one of the authors contributed

edit to add - see https://www.ukhillwalking.com/news/2014/01/cairngorm_glacier_a_reply_to_ada... & the links within

I absolutely love the section in Moran's book about the semi permanent snow fields.  

His theory that it would only take a 1.5c decrease to resurrect..

Alas we're going the other direction 😢

In reply to Lankyman: In 2010 the ‘Glacier de Cairngorm’ in Coire an Lochain was looking its best since the mid nineties. I had a Swiss client with me who was convinced it was a glacier, as it had several crevasses and a serac. She took a lot of persuading that it was only temporary. That was in the month of May.

In reply to Doug:

Interesting though that article was, I think it was pretty flawed. I went out and had a good look around in the corrie and I didn't agree with some of their observations that they said supported the presence of a glacier. Also, their model suggested that there was a theoretical possibility of a glacier forming at that time but it rested on some quite uncertain assumptions. Unfortunately they presented it as having proven the existence of a glacier at that time and it was widely reported as such. Within a year or two it had made it into school textbooks that there was a little ice age glacier. I got kids to write 'well, maybe' beside it.  

In reply to DaveHK: In 1994 I went into the bergschrund, which was around 7 meters deep. I also went under the ice from close to The Vent, all the way to the Y-Gullies. 

In reply to Edshakey:

Iain implied on social media that that patch was a goner too.

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

Highlander 2 (movie)?

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

It's a research project at MIT: https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/