At the foot of a majestic rock cirque in the Hautes-Pyrénées, the Oulettes de Gaube glacier is just a shadow of itself. The summer of 2022 dealt him a mortal blow, lacerating him in two. Now the bottom is covered by a layer of stones that hides the ice. You have to advance over the black mass to glimpse a bluish reflection, in a fault from which fresh air escapes. The upper part, located on a rocky bar, is fragmented. Every now and then, on this mid-September day, a serac runs down the slope with a thud. The ancient white giant is dying, like the seventeen glaciers of the Pyrenees.
“He is living his last years, whatever we do”breathes Pierre René, glaciologist and mountain guide, during a scientific excursion. With the Moraine association, which he created, he has been following, since 2002, the evolution of the last eleven glaciers on the French side (there are still six on the Spanish side). He never tires of admiring what he considers “one of the most legendary views” of the massif: the Oulettes, dominated by the emblematic Vignemale, the highest peak on the French side (3,298 meters).
It is impossible not to feel dizzy in front of these colossi of extreme power and fragility. Monsters that have shaped the landscape for tens of thousands of years and that disintegrate in a few decades under the effect of human activities. “The mountains are losing their identity due to climate change”he laments.
Pierre René shows photographs from the past, witnesses of a lost glacial greatness. In a photograph from 1892, the Oulettes de Gaube glacier occupies the entire cirque, joining its neighbor, the Petit Vignemale. Now, the latter, hanging from the cliff, is also cut in two, occupying less than 2 hectares, an area under which Pierre René considers a glacier to be dead. The Oulettes glacier, for its part, only measures 5.5 hectares in total, compared to 30 hectares at the end of the 19th century.my century – far from the Alpine giants, estimated in square kilometers and not in hectares.
With a front located at 2,280 meters above sea level, it is the lowest in the Pyrenees. If it has been able to survive it is only thanks to the topography: located on the north face of Vignemale and protected by the imposing wall, it is very little exposed to the sun. This huge wall also forms a funnel that allows snow to accumulate on the glacier throughout the winter. Despite everything, the contributions are insufficient to compensate for the thaw. Temperatures have increased an average of 1.7°C in the Pyrenees since 1880, a faster increase than on a global scale.
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