Wenn das Eis schmilzt

The glaciologist Benedikt Schnyder lives and works in the Swiss Canton Wallis amongst the snow-covered alpine peaks of the winter sport resort Saas-Fee. For 35 years he has been observing the development of the glaciers, the retreat of the ice and its connected environmental damage and dangers that result from it. For the Canton Wallis alone, the academic explores and surveys 16 glaciers in all. The film accompanies Mr Schnyder to his, often dangerous, field trips into the mountains, where crevasses, avalanches and ice falls threaten. Although he is a very experienced mountaineer, he has already fallen and been buried 7 times in the snow and ice. Following his grandfather's footsteps, who was guide to the Belgium king; he has been intimate with the mountains since childhood and became a qualified mountain guide. Mr Schnyder examines the composition of the glaciers from the drilled core samples. He gets a fair overview from helicopter, equipped with binoculars and camera, but in the end it comes down to him climbing up with ice pick in hand to do his detailed detection work. One of his many jobs includes being the expert on site when a dangerous glacier lake is drained. His energetic involvement results from his love of the mountains and nature in total. In his opinion, the retreat of the glaciers is very obviously a result of global warming, and he warns expressively to take this development serious so as not to leave irreversible environmental damage to the following generations.