Fee Glacier

The Fee Glacier (German: Feegletscher) is a 4.7 km (2.9 mi) long glacier (2005) situated in the Pennine Alps in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. In 1973, it had a length of 5.0 km (3.1 mi) and an area of 7.5 km2 (2.9 sq mi). It lies east of the Mischabel range, between the summit of Dom on the north and Allalinhorn on the south. The glacier is accessible via the Mittelallalin cable car and is used as a ski area.

Fee Glacier (German: Feegletscher) descends on the north-east flank of the Mischabel range, splitting into Feegletscher Nord and Süd above the resort of Saas-Fee. Glacier Monitoring of Switzerland (GLAMOS) length surveys show that the glacier measured roughly 4.6 km in 2019 and has retreated by about 1,100 m since systematic observations began in 1883, equivalent to one quarter of its 19th-century extent. The monitoring network also records a strongly negative specific-mass trend since the late 1980s, with ice-thickness losses commonly exceeding 1 m w.e. a year during the extreme summers of 2022–24.

During the Little Ice Age the glacier over-rode a prehistoric rock-avalanche deposit known as the Guglen slide. Detailed sediment mapping of the Feegletscher Nord foreland shows a tongue of unsorted avalanche boulders partly re-worked into an arcuate end-moraine and hummocky debris zone as the advancing ice bulldozed coarse talus downslope. Clast-fabric analysis and grain-size data confirm a mosaic of paraglacial and subglacial processes: pulverised bedrock and muddy, poorly-sorted sandy gravels sit side-by-side with subglacially sheared tills, demonstrating how a single glacier advance can redistribute millions of cubic metres of pre-existing collapse material across the valley floor.

Glacier data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).