Couple Takes a Picture in Front of Swiss Alps 15 Years Apart. It Reflects the Grim Reality of Climate Change

The astronomical snowfall of the 1880s and 1890s deluged an avalanche of snowflakes into the 11,000-year-old Rhone glacier. As time went by, the snow froze into what came to be known as the “eternal ice.” For many years that followed, the Rhone glacier blanketed the Swiss mountains in the cloak of white ice. The glacier tipped in the Alps of south-central Switzerland spilling its meltwater in Lake Geneva. People visited the glacier and walked through the glistening blue walls of its ice grotto. However, as Earth started to get warmer due to global warming, the glacier began to shrink. A software developer from Bristol, England, Duncan Porter (@misterduncan) shared two pictures showing a horrific contrast between how the glacier was in 2009 versus its 2024 version.

“Fifteen years minus one day between these photos. Taken at the Rhone glacier in Switzerland today,” Duncan wrote in the tweet, which has been viewed by 4.7 million people ever since. Beneath the caption, he shared two pictures, both recorded at a point in Rhone Glacier. One was from August 2009 while the other was from August 2024. The pictures show Duncan and his wife Helen Porter standing against a fence with the backdrop of Rhone Glacier. While the couple appears to be just as cheerful in both photos, the noteworthy contrast relates to the glacier in the background.

The first photograph shows a valley carpeted in a thick veil of white ice with colossal brown Alps jutting upwards around it. The mountains too are dusted in white snow, which makes the entire scene look like a snowy wonderland. In what may seem like a grim disparity, the background in the second photograph is far from a snowy wonderland. Instead, it looks like an ordinary urban setting painted in charcoal greys, pale blues, olive green, and brown. At the farthest end, stand the same Swiss Alps, devoid of the white ice powder this time. Streaming along the foothills is a vast green lake which was once a tiny pool of icy water crevassed between shiny blocks of ice. “Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Duncan wrote.

According to The Guardian, the couple had taken the original photo from the viewpoint of a “Wes Anderson-style” hotel that is now shut. They ventured on this trip excited to show the glacier to their daughters and recreate memories, never imagining how the glacier would have transformed in 15 years. “I thought it was really unbelievable,” commented Helen. “A lot of people, when they see something like that, they feel quite helpless,” added Duncan. For a clearer perspective, he also shared cropped images of the contrast.

Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climate scientist and co-author of an IPCC report, who visited the glacier as a teenager, told the news channel that it’s sad to see these pictures. “It was a very impressive glacier,” she reminisced. On X, people reacted to the couple’s pictures with shock and disbelief. An architect, @damonzumbroegel, said, “I’ve gone back to oceans without fish, mountains without glaciers, forests replaced by cities, not gonna lie, I cry.” @jaideeparora_ wrote, “That just breaks my heart! The consequences of our actions are all around us and yet we choose to look the other way.”

As it turns out, it’s not just the Rhone glacier that has lost so much ice in the past decade. A 2023 report revealed that many of the 1,400 Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their total volume in three decades. Daniel Farinotti, a glacier scientist who studied Rhone, told the New York Times, that the glacier has retreated about half a kilometer since 2007 and that a big glacial pond is forming at its base. “The darker the surface, the more sunlight it absorbs and the more melt that’s generated.”