The storms have made it difficult to search for more than a dozen hikers who remain missing for a day after a large chunk of an alpine glacier in Italy broke, sending an avalanche of ice, snow and rocks down the slope.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi pledged Monday night that his government will work to prevent a repeat of the tragedy in which at least seven people died.
Eight people were injured in the Marmolada Glacier, the largest glacier in the Dolomites that straddles the Veneto and Trentino regions on Sunday afternoon. Thirteen people were still missing Monday evening.
“Today Italy mourns these victims,” Draghi said during a visit to the site near the mountain town of Canazei. “This is a drama that certainly has unforeseen elements, but it certainly also depends on the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation. Now we have to take measures so that what happened in La Marmola does not happen again in Italy ”.
At least four bodies have been identified, taken to a makeshift morgue on an ice rink in Canazei. Three have been identified as Italians, including an experienced mountain guide who had been at the head of a group of hikers, and a 27-year-old man who sent a selfie to his brother 15 minutes before the avalanche fell on chopped, touching a popular hiking trail.
According to media reports, missing issues include Italians, three Romanians, one French, one Austrian and four Czech. Two of the injured are said to be German.
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Veneto President Luca Zaia said some of those hiking in the area on Sunday were stuck together as they climbed.
Sixteen cars were left unclaimed in the parking lot in the area, while authorities tried to locate the owners through license plates. It was unclear how many of the cars could have belonged to the already identified victims or the injured, all of whom were airlifted to hospitals on Sunday.
Rescue operations were hampered on Monday due to a storm, before resuming with the use of drones. The storm forced Draghi’s helicopter to divert to the site, and the prime minister was traveling by car from Verona.
Rescue teams are concentrated at the bottom of Mount Marmolada following Sunday’s avalanche. Photography: Andrea Solero / EPA
“It’s an unimaginable carnage,” a source told Rai News. “Some bodies will only be identified by DNA testing.”
Prosecutors have opened an investigation into “unknowns due to culpable disaster.”
It was not immediately known what caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break and thunder down the slope at an expert-estimated speed of nearly 200 mph (300 km / h). But the heat wave that has gripped Italy since May, which has caused unusually high temperatures for early summer, even in the normally cooler Alps, was cited as a likely factor.
“Temperatures have been well above normal levels for days and last winter there was not much snow, which basically no longer protects the glacier,” Renato Colucci of the Council’s Polar Science Institute told Ansa National Research Office (Cnr-Isp). “This probably produced a lot of melted water at the base of this piece of glacier.”
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at Italy’s CNR state research center, noted that the long heat wave, which spanned May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy during that period for nearly 20 years. years.
“It’s absolutely an anomaly,” Gabrieli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it would have been impossible to predict when or if a serac, a pinnacle of the cantilever of a glacier, could break, as it did on Sunday.
Alpine lifeguards said Sunday that by the end of last week the temperature at the 3,300-meter (11,000-foot) peak had exceeded 10ºC (50F), much higher than usual. Shelter operators on the mountain slope said temperatures at 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) had recently reached 24ºC (75 F), a hitherto unprecedented heat in a place where people go in the summer to stay cool.
Pope Francis tweeted an invitation to pray for the victims and their families. “The tragedies we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently seek new ways to respect people and nature,” he said.
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Known as the Queen of the Dolomites, the Marmolada has lost more than 80% of its volume over the past 72 years, with the speed of its thawing accelerating over the past decade. Italian scientists warned in 2020 that the glacier could disappear in 15 years due to global warming.
La Marmolada has been measured every year since 1902 and is considered a “natural thermometer” of climate change.
“This is the first time such an event has taken place in La Marmolada,” said Aldino Bondesan, a professor of geophysics at the University of Padua and a member of the Italian Glaciological Committee. “Studies have been made of the Marmolada, to see the variations in the thickness of the glacier and the snow, and variations in its front, but I do not think that there is any study dedicated to the danger that it breaks like falls of this types have never been registered “.
Low snowfalls, combined with higher-than-usual temperatures in winter, have also contributed to the acceleration of glacier melting.
“This year we have had a very particular year, perhaps worse than in 2003, as we are having high temperatures in summer and we have not had snow in winter or at least very little,” Bondesan added. “In June, the glaciers saw what they would normally look like in late August.”
The Italian Glaciological Committee oversees 200 of Italy’s 900 glaciers. In September 2019 and again in August 2020, homes were evacuated in a village in Courmayeur, in the Aosta Valley, after warnings that a large part of the Mont Blanc glacier, Planpincieux, was at risk of collapse.
Since 2013, Planpincieux has been closely monitored to detect the speed at which ice melts. In August 2018, a severe storm unleashed a rubble dump, killing an elderly couple when their car was swept off the road, which is currently closed. In the event of a collapse, the mass would take less than two minutes to reach the municipal road below.