Glacial masses in Europe’s Alps are turning out to be more shaky and hazardous as climbing temperatures connected to environmental change are stirring up what were for quite some time seen as lethargic, nearly fossilised sheets of ice. Italy has been heating up in a late-spring heatwave, and consideration has been centred around the effect of a dry spell on crops in the ripe Po Valley.
Further north in the Dolomites, misfortune struck on Sunday when an icy mass fell on the Marmolada, which at more than 3,300 metres is the most elevated point in the mountain range, killing no less than six individuals. This mid-year 2024 “dangers being a powerful coincidence for icy masses,” said Giovanni Baccolo, an ecological researcher and glaciologist at Milan-Bicocca University, noticing an absence of winter snow and a fiercely warm beginning to summer.
“No one might have expected an icy mass like the Marmolada to respond this way,” he told Reuters. “It is a sort of climatic fossil. Glacial masses like the Marmolada are considered ‘peaceful’; they are supposed to simply withdraw.” Temps on the regularly freezing Marmolada reached 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) on Saturday, Veneto territorial lead representative Luca Zaia said at the end of the week.
The immense mass of ice fell near Punta Rocca, on the course generally utilised by explorers and climbers to arrive at the culmination, the Alpine salvage unit said. “High height icy masses, such as the Marmolada, are often steep and rely on temperatures below zero degrees Celsius to stay stable,” said Poul Christoffersen, a Glaciology professor at the University of Cambridge.
“Yet, environmental change implies increasingly more meltwater, which delivers heat that heats the ice if the water re-freezes, or much more dreadful, lifting the glacial mass from the stone underneath and causing an unexpected unsound breakdown,” he added.
Bacolod said those gutsy climbers heading into the mountains to get away from the mid-year intensity ought to be cautious about where the adventure is. “The greeting I need to make to the people who go to the high mountains this late spring is to utilise significantly more wariness,” he said. “The issue is that it might as of now not be sufficient to peruse the signs from the glacial mass that have been perused up to this point.”
