Aside from these strips of glistening white snow, the mountains, which rise to an altitude of more than 2,000 meters (6,500 feet), are dry and covered in brown scrub. Beijing 2022 will be the first Winter Olympics to rely almost entirely on fake snow, which some athletes have warned could create dangerous, icy conditions.
But it’s unlikely to be the last, as the climate crisis is shrinking our winters. If global greenhouse gas emissions remain on the current trajectory, by the end of the century, only one of 21 previous Winter Olympics locations will have enough snow and ice to reliably host the Games, according to a recent study by the University of Waterloo, in Canada.
Among these locations is Squaw Valley, in the Sierra Nevada, California, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1960. Now known as Palisades Tahoe, it’s one of the local resorts for professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones.
A legend in big-mountain freeriding — earning Snowboarder Magazine’s Big Mountain Snowboarder of the Year title 11 times — Jones has spent much of his life on top of mountains, as well as carving down their steepest faces with a spray of powder in his wake. Over his three-decade career, he has witnessed the effects of climate change firsthand.
Jones says he’s seen it rain on mountain peaks in the dead of winter and watched glaciers recede over time. “Winters are often starting later, ending earlier and (there are) just more extremes of everything,” he says. “We’ll get half a season’s worth of snow in three days and then have two months without any snow.”
Shrinking seasons
A similar scenario happened this winter. At the end of November, when Lake Tahoe’s ski lifts would typically open, the sun shone and temperatures rose as high as 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees Celsius) — 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual for that time of year. The next month, 202 inches of snow — nearly 17 feet (5.2 meters) — dumped in the region, shutting down roads and resorts and making it the
Source : cnn
