A large chunk of an alpine glacier erupted on Sunday afternoon and descended a mountain in Italy, sending ice, snow and rocks crashing into hikers on a popular trail to the top and killing at least six and injuring eight, said the authorities.
There could be about 10 people missing, according to Civil Protection official Gianpaolo Bottacin in the online version of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. But Bottacin later told state television that it was not yet possible to provide a firm number.
The glacier, in the Sierra de la Marmolada, is the largest of the Dolomites in northeastern Italy and is skied there in winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly in recent years.
The fall of a piece of glacier in Italy has killed at least six people, local authorities said. (AP)
Experts at the CNR research center in Italy, which has a polar science institute, say the glacier will no longer exist in the next 25-30 years and that most of its volume has already disappeared. The Mediterranean basin, shared by southern Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, has been identified by UN experts as a “hot spot of climate change”, susceptible to heat waves and shortages of climate change. water, among other consequences.
On Sunday evening, officials were still working to determine how many hikers were in the area when the ice avalanche fell, said Walter Milan, a spokesman for the national alpine rescue corps that provided the number of dead and injured.
Lifeguards were reviewing license plates in the parking lot as part of checks to determine how many people could be missing, a process that could take hours, Milan told The Associated Press by telephone.
“We saw dead (people) and huge chunks of ice, rock,” exhausted-looking rescuer Luigi Felicetti told Italian state television.
The nationalities or ages of the dead were not immediately available, Milan said. Of the eight hospitalized survivors, two were in serious condition, authorities said.
Several people remain missing. (AP)
The rapid avalanche “came down with a roar that could be heard at a great distance,” local online media site ildolomiti.it said.
Earlier, the National Alpine and Cave Rescue Corps tweeted that the search for the affected area of Marmolada Peak involved at least five helicopters and rescue dogs.
Temporarily, the search for more victims or missing persons was halted as rescuers assessed the risk that more of the glacier could break, Walter Cainelli said, after conducting a rescue mission with a search dog, at the state television.
Lifeguards said ice blocks continued to fall. In the early evening a light rain began to fall.
The SUEM shipping service, based in the nearby Veneto region, said 18 people who were above the area where the ice fell would be evacuated by the alpine rescue corps.
The rescue operation is in progress. (AP)
But Milan said some on the track could go down alone, even using the cable car from the summit.
SUEM said the avalanche consisted of a “spill of snow, ice and rock.” The separate section is known as the serac, or ice pinnacle.
La Marmolada, with about 3.3 km at the top, is the highest peak in the Eastern Dolomites and offers spectacular views of other alpine peaks.
The alpine rescue service said in a tweet that the segment broke near Punta Rocca (rock point), “along the route usually used to reach the summit.”
It was not immediately clear what caused the ice section to break and precipitate down the slope of the peak. But the intense heat wave that has taken Italy since the end of June could be a factor.
A fierce conflict is taking place over these plants
“Temperatures these days clearly influenced” the partial collapse of the glacier, Maurizio Fugatti, president of Trento province, bordering Marmolada, told Sky TG24 News.
But Milan stressed that the high heat, which rose unusually above 10ºC at the peak of the Marmolada in recent days, was only one possible factor in Sunday’s tragedy.
“There are so many factors that could be involved,” Milan said. Avalanches are generally unpredictable, he said, and the influence of heat on a glacier “is even more impossible to predict.”
In separate comments on Italian state television, Milan described recent temperatures as “extreme heat” for the peak. “It’s clearly an abnormal thing.”
According to rescue services, the injured were taken to various hospitals in the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto.