Here, where the British helped the Swiss to invent skiing as a sport, the permanently frozen soil which binds the mountain together is melting. It is a disaster for life among the mountains and the lucrative Alpine skiing and tourism industry that sustains it.

Mountain-top restaurants and cable cars are starting to shift on their foundations. Already, landslides have become common, causing death as well as destruction costing millions of pounds to repair. The firm that maintains the Schilthorn cable car has to spend seven million Swiss francs (pounds 2.9 million) every year to maintain its stability.

Now a team of Swiss and British scientists, including Mr. Vonder Muehll, has uncovered disturbing evidence about the state of the mountain. The permafrost has warmed up by one degree centigrade in just 15 years at their three Alpine monitoring stations in the Alps: near Zermatt, St. Moritz and at the Schilthorn, where James Bond skied in the film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The research—Europe's first in-depth study into the fate of the permafrost—is the latest to provide evidence of rapid and widespread thawing around the world as global warming takes hold.

Ski instructors and mountain guides in the Alps are all too familiar with the impact of climate change. Yesterday, holidaymakers at the Schilthorn, in the Berner Oberland near Murren, enjoyed good snow, stretching to the bottom of the slopes. But the weather was warm, again, and as the day drew on visibility was clouded by one of the increasingly common fogs.

The once reliable Christmas snowfall has now shifted into early January, and snowfalls have become unpredictable, often leaving conditions dangerous for skiing and climbing. Cycles of hot and freezing weather are leading to unstable snow fields and a rising number of violent avalanches.

The problem can be seen throughout the Alps. Deirdre Rowe, the head of Optimum Ski, a chalet ski firm based near Les Arcs in France, said locals had noticed a steady rise in temperatures at the resort in recent years. Two years ago, a devastating avalanche in the Chamonix valley reduced chalets to matchwood, underlining the growing threat to property and the safety of holiday-makers.

The famed glaciers around Chamonix have visibly shrunk. Victorian tourists were able to step directly on to the Glace de Mer in the Vallee Blanche, but visitors now have to reach the glacier by cable car.

But the problem is especially acute in Switzerland because it has the steepest and most populated mountains in Europe.

In 1998 alone, scientists believe, warming permafrost caused more than 250 landslides, killing eight people and causing Swiss franc $1.3 billion (pounds 530 million) of damage. They predict that the toll will rise as climate change increases.

"It is a very, very sensitive topic for Switzerland, especially because tourism is so important for its economy," said Stephan Gruber, a scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Countless restaurants and hotels, as well as 288 ski lifts, are built into the permafrost. Scientists have already identified two ski lifts with structural problems and some buildings in which cracks were forming due to shifting of the ground.

The question in scientists' minds is no longer whether a landslide will happen, but where, when and what the damage will be. The problem is so acute that the geophysicists held a meeting last year with the cable car operators who are located in permafrost areas.

"Cable car operators don't want to tell us when they notice a problem," said Felix Keller, a geographer and glaciologist at Academia Engiadina. "We need to find solutions for them too." The solutions that the cable car companies find may not always be to the liking of the geologists.

The Gemstock ski lift operators in Andermatt responded to their structural problems last year by injecting 210 tonnes of cement into the mountain at a cost of Swiss franc $1.3 million (pounds 530,000). Geologically it was a disaster. "Cement warms up the mountain and melts the permafrost," said Mr. Keller.

Not all ski lifts sitting in permafrost are in danger. The Schilthorn cable car station continually circulates cold air under the building, keeping the ground, and the permafrost underneath it, frozen. Peter Feuz, director of the Schilthorn cable car, said his firm spends around Swiss franc seven million each year maintaining the building's stability. He needs to. More than two million people used his lift last year, many of them British.

Heinz Schoeni, a government official responsible for cable car safety, said his office was constantly monitoring the situation, and that all ski lifts in Switzerland remained safe.

But scientists now say they cannot predict accurately where mudslides and rock flows will occur next. In the past, geologists have been able to forecast landslides by looking at past magnitude and frequency. The melting of the permafrost changes all that. Once it is warmed, all it takes is a bout of heavy rain to cause a rockslide—with deadly results.