About Staubbachfall, Waterfalls, the Jungfrau and Swiss Things

Being up high in the world of glaciers is one of my favourite places to be. From the Eigergletscher (Eiger Glacier) rail station, one can just sit there for hours and watch the various glaciers in just one view. If you go up to the Jungfraujoch, you can marvel at the heritage protected Aletsch arena of glaciers spilling out before you.
 
We are all a bit wobblily on the issue of climate change since we mostly feel that our small contribution of reducing our carbon footprint and use of plastics and so forth, seems to be meniscal in comparison to these ginormous and gorgeous glaciers that really are shrinking.
 
GLAMOS (www.glamos.ch) regularly produce updated glacier inventories. Climate change is real. In the last 5 years or so, the Eiger Glacier has lost some length and thickness.
 
https://www.glamos.ch/factsheet#/A54m-03
 
In 1928 The Eiger Glacier was measured to have an area around 2.62 km2.
In 1973 the glacier had an area of 2.13 km2.
In 2011, it covers an area of 1.54 km2 and is 2.59 km long .
 
The relative area reduction is 30%.  
Photos are: left 31 07 2015 and right  21 08 2020
Source: SwissGlaciers.org

​​For more than 300 years, the permanent hole in the middle of the Giessen glacier has kept the people of Lauterbrunnen guessing. 
The so-called war hole is a common black spot, a gap in the ice mantle of the Giessen Glacier on the north-west flank of the Jungfrau massif . It can be seen from Wengen.

Whenever the spot is covered with ice, it is said that a major war will break out somewhere in the world. That was the case in the War of the Spanish Succession , in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 , 1914 and 1939 , but also earlier. The hole was also covered with ice during the Gulf War and the Six Day War .

An old valley myth claimed that a climber once reached the hole and reported that warm water flowed from the inside of the mountain. No one can say whether this is true.

Then on June 7, 2000 the Austrian mountaineer and researcher Rudi Mayr, accompanied by the Stechelberg mountain guide Jürg Abegglen, was the first recorded person ever to climb up the war hole after Air-Glaciers' helicopter pilot Sepp Galliker dropped him off.

Rudi Mayr also measured the radioactivity and cosmic radiation over a period of half an hour – all of this from the upper lip of the hanging glacier, where large boulders broke off non-stop, with the greatest risk of icefall. Mayr's comments on his findings of the same radiation exposures measured here as in Lauterbrunnen were:  "possibly be resulting from thermally induced emissions of radon from the crystalline rock of the war hole." Maybe that is a glimmer of reason for the myth of warm water.

The mountains hold tight to their many mysteries and secrets and at the moment there is still too much winter snow to know if the war hole has iced over with the current world wars.

Foto: Bgvr - Eigenes Werk Giessengletscher von der Grütschalp aus gesehen
Source:  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giessengletscher

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsloch