Overview
- A student team from the University of Lausanne installed two 10×10 m sheep-wool prototypes and a 10×10 m synthetic geotextile on the Tsanfleuron glacier and monitored melt from June to September 2026.
- The project reported on Wednesday that the wool blankets reduced local surface melt by over 50% across the 200 m² tested and performed at least as well as the synthetic control, with the thicker wool slightly outperforming the thinner sample.
- Organizers used otherwise discarded local sheep wool and anchored covers with recycled malt sacks filled with gravel to test a circular, low-waste supply chain that avoids shedding microplastic fibers from synthetic geotextiles.
- Researchers and project backers stress the results are preliminary and limited in scale, describing coverings as a temporary, local palliative that cannot replace the emission cuts needed to stop large-scale glacier loss.
- The trial sits against a longer climate context in which Swiss glaciers have lost roughly 40% of their mass and nearly 1,000 small formations have vanished, and experts say larger, longer tests are needed to judge durability, logistics and true scalability.