As search and rescue teams continue to discover body parts and hiking equipment in the wake of an avalanche in northeastern Italy that left seven people confirmed dead and five missing, glaciologists are confirming a “direct link” between the devastating ice collapse and climate change.
Hopes were dimming that those missing will be found alive, five days after a 200-metre-wide chunk of the Marmolada glacier—known as the Queen of the Dolomites—broke free, sending a crushing, 300-kilometre-per-hour torrent of ice and rock down onto unsuspecting hikers below.
“We have to be clear, finding someone alive with this type of event is a very remote possibility, very remote, because the mechanical action of this type of avalanche has a very big impact on people,” Alex Barattin of the Alpine Rescue Service told Bloomberg.
“There is no chance of getting to safety or perceiving the problem in advance, because by the time you perceive it, you’ve already been hit,” added Nicola Casagli, a geologist and avalanche expert at Florence University.
While it seems that not even the most experienced mountain guide could have predicted the collapse of the serac on Marmolada last Sunday (several guides were among the dead or missing), glaciologists are in no doubt that the scorching heat wave that has gripped much of Italy since May, coupled with an unusually warm, dry winter atop an extended period of drought, contributed to the tragedy.
The peak of the mountain had topped 10°C in recent days, and Walter Milan, a spokesperson for the National Alpine and Cave Rescue Corps, described that level of heat as “extreme” in a locale where temperatures would normally be below freezing at this time of year. “Clearly it’s something abnormal,” Milan told the Guardian.
Experts at Italy’s National Research Council say the glacier has lost 80% of its mass over the past 70 years, and will disappear within the next 30. Prof. Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre at the University of Bristol, told the Guardian an unusually dry winter had contributed to instability in the ice that remains.
Scientists are not the only ones invoking climate change in the tragedy. While “this is a drama that certainly has some unpredictability,” Italian Premier Mario Draghi told media after meeting with some of the family of those killed in the avalanche, the role of “environmental deterioration and the climate situation” was also undeniable.
“Today, Italy gathers close around the stricken families,” Draghi added, “The government must reflect on what happened and take measures, so that what happens has a very low possibility, or none, of repeating itself.”
AP says Pope Francis urged prayers for the avalanche victims and their families, adding, that “the tragedies that we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently search for new ways that are respectful of persons and nature.”
