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Pocket Switzerland

Aletsch Glacier

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Glacier · canton of Valais · 2800 m

The longest glacier in the Alps, UNESCO listed, rising at the foot of the Jungfrau and the Mönch.

From the basket

South of the Jungfrau stretches the giant of the Alpine glaciers. From the balloon it is a river of ice more than twenty-three kilometres long, flowing towards the Rhône valley, streaked with long dark bands of moraine, like the lanes of a giant motorway. Nine giants of more than four thousand metres escort it.

Follow it up to its source. It is fed by several glaciers coming down from the peaks: the Jungfraufirn, which descends from the slopes of the Jungfrau and the Mönch, the Aletschfirn to the west, and others besides. All of them meet on a vast esplanade of ice, the Konkordiaplatz, the glaciers’ Place de la Concorde. From there the great current sets off again towards the south.

Further down, to the east, lies Lake Märjelen, at the edge of the ice, and at the very bottom the ice ends in a narrow gorge where the Massa is born, running down to the Rhône. In the middle, the ice advances by nearly two hundred metres a year, without the eye being able to see it.

The glacier carries an enormous mass, about twenty-seven billion tonnes. Like all the glaciers of the Alps, though, it shrinks year after year. Fly over it from end to end, from the foot of the Jungfrau to the forests that border it below.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Glacier d’Aletsch” (in French).

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