Britain’s “longest-lived” snow spot, nicknamed the “Sphinx”, disappeared in October.
The Sphinx is located in Garbh Choire Mor, which is located at an altitude of 1296 meters on the mountain Braeriach – Britain’s third highest mountain.
Garbh Choire Mor is described as Scotland’s snowiest bottom, which is a valley formed by erosion, due to the amount of snow it can hold through the summer months.
Photos published by Iain Cameron, an expert at the Royal Meteorological Society Twitter shows how the snow spot has gradually melted away during October.
This is the eighth time that the snow spot on the Scottish mountains has disappeared. This happened in 1933, 1959, 1996, 2003, 2006, 2017 and 2018. Before 1933, it is assumed that the snow has been there since the 18th century.
Cameron visited the snow spot in early October. At that time, the area was “critically small” and only four meters large.
On October 20, a new update came on Twitter. By then, the stain had melted down to one meter, with a thickness of only a few centimeters.
“Both I and another expert estimate that it melted today, probably around 4 pm,” he wrote then.
He describes the incident as “a sign of change”.
Extraordinarily close call for The Sphinx. It was visited today just before noon, and found to be tiny. Less than 1m long, but crucially only a few cms thick. The view of myself and another expert observer is that it melted today, probably around 4pm.
New photos from October 25 show that there was new snow that settled as a thin layer over the Sphinx.
Cameron, who has studied Scottish snowflakes for 25 years, explains BBC Scotland that the snow spot is the longest living in the UK, but that this is now about to change.
– This is being challenged now, considering that it disappears more often, he says, and explains that climate change “seems to be the logical explanation” for the changes.
– How ironic is it not that our longest-lived snow spot melts for the third time in five years, just before the start of Cop26. Before 2000, it had only melted three times in the last 150 years, Cameron writes on Twitter.
It was on 31 October that the UN climate summit COP26 was formally opened in Glasgow. The meeting lasts for two weeks, and almost 200 countries participate.
CLIMATE CRISIS: Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, gave a very engaging speech on the climate crisis at the UN General Assembly in New York on 22 September. Video: AP view more
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– Must be protected
Cameron, who has also written the book “The vanishing ice”, emphasizes that research shows that there are fewer snow patches.
– There is less snow now than in the 1980s and 90s, he says The Guardian.
Braeriach is located in the Cairngorms mountain range. In a report about the mountain range, there has been a trend for increasingly warmer weather since the 1960s, and researchers suggest that by 2080 there will be several years with very little or no snow in the Cairngorms.
Lauren McCallum from the international organization “Protect Our Winters” emphasizes to The Guardian that Cairngorms, and the rest of the world, must be protected from further temperature rises.
– We must maintain a healthy temperature for our ecosystems and society to survive, she says.
