AUSTRIA 2021
SCIENCE
By Lisi Niesner
S
ALIEN WORLD UNDER
cientists are venturing inside otherworldly ice caves growing beneath Austria’s doomed glaciers to study why they are melting even faster than expected, and understand the fate that will befall glaciers elsewhere if climate change is not halted.
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It is already too late to save the glaciers of the eastern Alps, which scientists now say are past the point of no return and will be gone completely in the next few decades. The eerie blue caverns beneath them hold clues as to how the ice -- which built up over millennia and
melted over decades -- collapsed far faster than expected. That could help communities that depend on glaciers in other parts of the world to better manage their decline. “We can’t do anything anymore for eastern Alpine glaciers. But here we can see what happens if we do noth-
