One expert warned that the summer of 2022 risks becoming a ‘perfect storm for glaciers’ due to rising temperatures and a lack of winter snow.
Glaciers in the European Alps are becoming more unstable and dangerous as rising temperatures linked to climate change are reawakening what have long been considered quasi-fossil ice sheets.
Italy baked in an early summer heatwave, and in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains tragedy happened on sunday when a glacier collapsed on the highest peak in the range – Marmolada – killing at least seven people.
Another 14 people are still missing, and authorities warn that it is unclear how many people were on the 3,300-metre mountain when the glacier gave way.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on Monday linked the collapse to climate change.
The collapse of the glacier “is definitely related to the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation,” Draghi said during a visit to the rescue operation’s headquarters in the Dolomites.
What caused a glacier peak to break and thunder downhill – at a speed estimated by experts at around 300 km/h (186 mph), causing huge chunks of ice, snow and rock hits hikers – not immediately known.
But the tragedy came a day after record high temperatures of up to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) were recorded at the top of the glacier, which has been melting rapidly over the past several decades, with much of the body’s body in the water. Its vestige has disappeared.
‘The perfect storm for glaciers’
“This summer of 2022 risks becoming the perfect storm for glaciers,” said Giovanni Baccolo, an environmental scientist and glaciologist at the University of Milan-Bicocca, noting that winters lack snow and Summer begins to be intensely hot in Italy.
“No one would have expected a glacier like Marmolada to react like this,” he told Reuters.
“It’s a climate fossil, glaciers like Marmolada are considered ‘calm’, they are expected to retreat.”
Baccolo said intrepid hikers heading into the mountains to escape the summer heat should be careful about where they venture out, as it “may no longer be enough to read signs from the glacier that have been read until.” now”.
Poul Christoffersen, professor of glaciology at the University of Cambridge, said high-altitude, steep glaciers like Marmolada rely on sub-zero temperatures to “keep them stable”.
“But climate change means more and more water is melting, releasing heat that heats the ice if the water freezes again, or even worse: lifting the glacier up from the ice underneath and causing the ice,” he said. sudden destabilization collapse.
The Mediterranean Basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot”, likely to suffer from heat waves and water shortages, with many other consequences.
