The Blaueis is the northernmost glacier in the Alps and is located in the municipality of Ramsau in the Bavarian part of the Berchtesgaden Alps. The glacier is exposed on the north side in the upper Blaueiskar, embedded between the walls of Blaueisspitze (2480 m), Hochkalter (2607 m) and Kleinkalter (2513 m), which surround the glacier in a horseshoe shape.
Due to its relatively low altitude, the blue ice is particularly affected by the retreat of the Alpine glaciers. Around 1820 the first maps showed a total area of 25 ha. In 1884 an area of 19.6 ha was measured; In 1953 the blue ice had shrunk to 13.1 ha.
Since the mid-1980s, rocks have increasingly aerated in the middle of the blue ice, completely separating the upper part of the glacier from the lower dead ice field, the former glacier tongue. The decline in the ice mass in the lower field is particularly strong because it no longer receives any replenishment from the higher glacier area due to the separation.[1][Note. 1] Both ice fields together measured only 7.5 ha in 2009. The thickness of the ice determined with georadar was (only) up to 16 meters, the average ice thickness was less than 7.4 meters; the volume was given as around 560,000 m³. For 2018, an area of 5.2 ha, an average thickness of 5.3 m (with a maximum of 17 m) and a volume of 280,000 m³ were determined. The ice at the bottom was increasingly protected from rapid retreat by a debris cover. The blue ice will probably have almost completely melted away in a few years. (Wikipedia)