Sandersee

The Sandersee lies high in the Hohe Tauern range of Carinthia, a post-glacial lake born when the Pasterze glacier shrank after 1956. It sits in a hollow scooped out by the ice and is fed by melt-water from the Möll river. The lake once stretched to 121 566 square metres in 1979, but its size now rises and falls with the river’s flow. The lake’s worth lies in what it shows of climate change. Every year it receives an estimated 66 000 cubic metres of rock and silt carried by the Möll, and only when the river runs high is the basin fully flooded. Engineers raised its outflow twice, in 1969 and 1982, to keep sand from reaching the Margaritze reservoir downstream, lifting the water area by ten per cent. Visitors find a quiet stretch of water ringed by moraines and scree slopes. The Pasterze glacier’s snout once touched the lake, but it now ends higher up where new pools have formed. These newer lakes grow each summer, fed by icebergs that can drift half a kilometre in three hours. The scene is one of constant change, a place where the landscape is still rearranging itself after the ice has gone.