Glacier tragedy reveals reach of Europe’s heat
Effects from climate change are being felt across the continent
CANAZEI, Italy — Days before a glacier in the Italian Dolomites broke off with the force of a collapsing skyscraper, crushing at least nine hikers under an avalanche of ice, snow and rock, Carlo Budel heard water running under the ice.
“I heard what sounded like a river’s torrent,” said Budel, who lives in an isolated refuge next to the glacier on the 11,000-foot Marmolada mountain. At the mountain’s base, he watched a yellow helicopter fly overhead searching for signs of life, or remains.
Budel recalled that when he first scaled the glacier at the end of summer, not even a decade ago, he hardly needed ropes there was so much snow.
“At this point we are on another path,” he said.
It is an increasingly common path for a world confronting the deadly consequences of extreme weather brought on by human-made, and irreversible, climate change.
A year after Greece lost lives, livestock and entire swathes of forest to wildfires, and deadly floods swept through Germany, the calamity in these mountains provided the latest evidence that almost no part of the continent can escape the effects of Europe’s new, intense and often unlivable summer heat. That includes the highest peak of the Dolomites.
Italy is suffering through another prolonged and scorching heat wave, which contributed to the disaster and has brought the worst drought in 70 years along the Po River, its longest waterway, cutting off fountains and parching parts of the country.
“These kinds of events, they are getting more and
more frequent, and they will be more frequent with enhanced global warming,” said Susanna Corti, the coordinator of the Global Change unit of Italy’s National Research Council.
Corti said if temperatures keep increasing, “we won’t have glaciers anymore” on the Alps, a dramatic change over the past million or more years in Europe, with enormous and unpredictable consequences on the shape of the continent, vegetation, animal life and the water cycle.
Corti said glaciers needed to be monitored more carefully, because “the risk of this kind of event is increasing” and because things “won’t go back to the way they were.”
Massimiliano Fazzini, a climate expert with the Italian Society of Environmental Geology, said Italy has about 920 glaciers, almost entirely in the Alps, though only about 70 of them were monitored annually by
the Italian Glaciological Committee.
Their contribution of snow and melted ice varied considerably depending on the year, but the water from them was usually used to fill artificial lakes that provide electricity or to direct water to rivers in times of drought. In the past 20 years, Fazzini said, Italy had lost 25% of the water from those shrinking glaciers.
On Wednesday, as the ominous whir of helicopters buzzed over the village of Canazei, with its neat alpine houses, the authorities set up under the Marmolada mountain, known as the Queen of the Dolomites, and announced that aid workers had recovered the remains of two more people spotted by drones. That brought the death toll from Sunday’s avalanche up to nine, four of whom have been identified as Italian, with five people still missing.
“We are doing everything possible to find these
people,” said Maurizio Fugatti, president of Trento province.
They were victims of what Prime Minister Mario Draghi called “the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation.”
Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, speaking Tuesday in Mozambique, said it was a “symbol of what climate change, if not governed, is producing around the world.”
“There is no hope without everyone’s cooperation,” Mattarella said.
The Dolomites in northeastern Italy, with their jagged peaks, fresh air scented with the sawing of logs from the dense alpine forests, their hills gurgling with clear creeks, have long offered Italy and all of Europe a respite from the summer heat. But now they too are warming up, with the heat wave raising temperatures on the usually frigid mountains to around 50 degrees.
That helped melt the ice on a glacier that, from 2004 to 2015, had already shrunk 30% in volume, according to a 2019 study by Italy’s National Research Council and international universities. The researchers predicted the disappearance of the glacier in 25 to 30 years.
Other experts have said that up to half of the glaciers in the Alps may disappear by 2050, and a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year predicted irreversible loss of glaciers by the end of this century.
The consequences are dire for human life, the environment and local economies. The melting is even shifting national boundaries, which have often been drawn along glacial lines.
“Climate change,” Franco Narducci, an Italian politician, recently told Parliament, contributed to “the erosion and contraction of glaciers,” and forced the country to rethink how it drew its borders.
The most notable example has been the Rifugio Guide del Cervino, a traditional mountain lodge in the Pennine Alps on the border with Switzerland near the Matterhorn. The melting of a glacier has moved more of the refuge into Switzerland, causing a bureaucratic headache for the owner, who wants to stay in Italy, and an unexpected diplomatic headache for the two countries.
But now the pain is most acute in Canazei, the town in the Trentino area of Italy that sits in the mountain’s shadow.
On Tuesday, as reporters waited for helicopters to bring the region’s president to a news conference, Debora Campagnaro, whose sister Erica Campagnaro and brother-in-law, Davide Miotti, were still missing, took advantage of the assembled press to chastise the local authorities for not installing detection and warning devices that would have prevented people from approaching the glacier.
“My brother-in-law was an Alpine guide, extremely expert,” she said. “If he had only a sign of danger, he would not have gone with my sister. Husband and wife would not have left two children back home,” she said, her voice cracking.
Given the heat of the previous days, Campagnaro said, someone was to blame for not doing something. But as she broke from the crowd and returned to her car, she said there was another culprit: “The climactic things.”
In a grass field at the foot of the mountain, roped off with police tape, only a blue Dacia with plates from the Czech Republic remained. A sunshade glinted in the bright sun across its windshield and a spare gray T-shirt and pair of socks waited in the back. It belonged, Fugatti said, to one of the missing or dead on the mountain.