Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
new reservoir, to create artificial snow to feed some of the lower slopes when
winters were particularly warm. Tourism was still the main source of income for
the area; the community had adjusted, even if it was worrying that the iconic
snow-capped peaks looked less impressive when an increasingly wide bare black
band of rock was exposed above the grasslands each year.
Some decades later, with average temperatures around 4 °C higher than those
that had started the influx of foreign mountaineers to scale the peaks in the
Victorian and Edwardian periods, things were very different. The mountain
glaciers were virtually gone. Only small patches of ice persisted on the very
highest peaks and the winter snow lay barely long enough for the skiing season
to start before it had to close down. A panorama of summer snow-clad peaks was
no more. Trees were encroaching more and more and a sparse vegetation had
established on the exposed rocky debris. The forest trees grew better but there
was a reduced market for their timber because people had drifted away. The
tourist income had disappeared, both in winter for lack of snow and in summer
because it had still been the snowy peaks that had epitomized the area. The bare
rock was less able to attract people now that air travel was so much more
expensive than it had been at the turn of the century. Many wooden chalets had
been abandoned and the farmland had been amalgamated into bigger units that
were profitable now that food was expensive everywhere.
The local population could get by, indeed it had started to increase again as
newcomers moved in from lowland areas that were becoming too hot for comfort,
but there were few luxuries. The forests were at first undisturbed by loggers or
human visitors and the bears and even some wolves began to move back from
areas that had been protected for nature conservation during the period of intense
tourism. But this was to be short-lived. The temperature was still rising and word
spread among refugees that the alpine valleys and lower slopes were equable.
Soon the area was busy again with a relatively self-contained community, learning
rapidly to manage with a spartan lifestyle. The houses were repaired and forestry
revived to supply the materials locally. Food was still a problem, partly alleviated
by chickens and goats and vegetable patches and a system of bartering for goods
and services.
For the moment the future looked more hopeful. There had been major
catastrophes elsewhere: coastal cities, even huge tracts of land flooded by the
rising sea levels, millions of people dead from a combination of water shortage,
water-borne disease and inadequate nutrition coupled with heat stroke. Former
centres of civilization had been mostly abandoned and millions, who had not
died where they had lived, had tried to move and only a few had had the funds
to be able to settle in more equable places. But now new centres were emerging
and the archaeologists had new material for their models of cultural loss and
resurgence - if only the temperature would soon stop rising.
