MB Civic

By REUTERS

GRINDELWALD, Switzerland, Aug. 11 — Sometimes, global warming can help put money in an entrepreneur’s pocket.

Hansruedi Burgener has welcomed up to 800 people a day — twice the average number of visitors — to his remote mountain hostel in the Alps this summer.

They all hope to watch a rock the size of two Empire State Buildings collapse onto the canyon floor, about 650 feet below, as retreating glacier ice robs a cliff face on the eastern edge of a mountain, the Eiger, of its main support.

“We would also have made a living without the rock coming down,” Mr. Burgener, a former mountain guide, said. “But it would have been a bit quieter.”

Accessible only by a steep hike of more than an hour, Mr. Burgener’s place offers a safe view of the crumbling rock, plus cold beer and other refreshments.

Every few minutes or so, there is a surprisingly loud sound as a boulder comes thundering down, sending a cloud of dust into the air. The sharp crackle of smaller stones rolling down the cliff face is almost continuous.

The spectacle is a reminder that the Alps have been hit hard by rising temperatures, and it underscores warnings from scientists that thawing permafrost — the frozen soil that can glue mountains together — will cause more havoc.

Glaciers in the Alps may have lost up to a tenth of their volume in the hot 2003 summer alone, researchers at Zurich University have said, and the ice now only occupies a third to a half of its volume in 1850.

Warming is at least part of the reason the five million tons of rock are slowly sliding off the Eiger — one of Switzerland’s most legendary peaks, whose infamous North Face has claimed the lives of dozens of climbers.

Several sometimes fatal accidents among climbers have been attributed to increasingly unstable conditions on lofty slopes and ridges. Switzerland’s news media have even started pondering the endurance of the snow-capped mountains that define the nation’s identity. But Hans- Rudolf Keusen, a geologist, whose company, Geotest, has been ordered by the authorities to monitor the Eiger rock slide, cautions against jumping to conclusions.

“It’s got to do with the retreating of the glacier, which at least partially is caused by global warming,” he said. But he added: “The Alps are not falling apart. Not that quickly anyway.”

Huge rock slides took place in the Alps long before there were any signs that world temperatures were rising.

In 1806, a chunk of mountain 20 times the size of the rock now coming off the Eiger, killed 457 people in a valley near another mountain, wiping the entire village of Goldau off the map in one of Switzerland’s worst disasters.

When he opened his cabin for business in June in the heartland of Switzerland’s tourism industry, Mr. Burgener became the first to notice something moving in the rock on the cliff face.

His hopes of making more money seem dulled by his worries about what climate change is doing to this valley.

“Anybody can see it,’’ he said. “It’s going rapidly, with the glacier disappearing, the moraines are getting bigger, the streams coming down are enormous. And it hasn’t rained; it’s all meltwater.”

He should know. His cabin was built only this year — after a mudslide swept the ground from under his old place just a few hundred yards away.