Kanazei, Italy — A few days before the glaciers of the Dolomites in Italy collapse under the force of a skyscraper, crushing at least nine hikers under an avalanche of ice, snow and rocks, Carlobdel squeezes the water flowing under the ice. I heard.
“I heard the sound like a torrent of a river,” said Budel, who lives in an isolated shelter next to the glacier of Mount Marmolada, which is 11,000 feet. At the foot of the mountain, he saw a yellow helicopter fly overhead in search of signs of life.
Budel recalled that when he first scaled the glacier at the end of summer, he didn’t need a rope that was barely snowing, even ten years ago.
“The difference between now and then is scary,” he said. “At this point, we are on another path.”
It is an increasingly common path for the world to face the deadly consequences of extreme weather events brought about by man-made and irreversible climate change.
A year after Greece lost all lives, livestock and forests to wildfires and a deadly flood struck Germany, this week’s disasters in these mountains are largely due to the new devastating effects of Europe on most parts of the continent. It provided the latest evidence that it cannot escape and often the uninhabitable summer heat. This includes the highest peaks of the Dolomites.
Italy suffers from another prolonged scorching heat wave that causes disasters, causing the worst drought in 70 years along the longest waterway, the Po River, blocking fountains and part of the country. Dried.
Susanna Corti, coordinator of the Global Change Unit of the Italian National Research Council, said:
Dr. Corti said that as temperatures continue to rise, the Alps “glaciers are gone.” This has brought about dramatic changes in Europe over the past million years, with continental shapes, vegetation, animal life and the water cycle.
Dr. Corti said glaciers need to be monitored more closely because “the risk of this type of event is increasing” and “things do not return to their original state”.
Professor Massimiliano Fazzini, a climate expert at the Italian Society of Environmental Geology, says that Italy currently has about 920 glaciers, almost entirely in the Alps, of which the Italian Glacier Commission monitors each year. He said it was only about 70.
The contributions of snow and melted ice vary considerably from year to year, but water from them was typically used to fill artificial lakes that power or direct water to rivers during droughts. In the last two decades, Professor Fazini said Italy has lost 25 percent of its water from those shrinking glaciers.
On Wednesday, when a helicopter’s ominous whirlpool disturbed the village of Kanazei, where there is a commercial alpine house of neat cheese and chocolate, authorities set up workers under a mountain known as the Queen of Dolomites. Two more bodies found by the drone, which they announced to help, were recovered. As a result, up to nine people were killed in the avalanche on Sunday, four of whom were identified as Italian and five of whom are still missing.
“We are doing everything we can to find these people,” said President Maurizio Fugatti of Trent.
They were victims of what Prime Minister Mario Draghi called “deterioration of the environment and climatic conditions.” Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella spoke in Mozambique on Tuesday, saying, “It symbolizes what climate change is happening around the world if it is not governed.”
“There is no hope without everyone’s help,” said Mattarella.
Dolomite in northeastern Italy is a long summer heat throughout Italy and Europe, with jagged peaks, fresh air scented with log saws from dense alpine forests, and rumbling hills in clear streams. We have provided a rest from the beginning. But now they are getting warmer too, and heat waves have raised the temperature of the normally frigid mountains to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
This helped melt the glacier ice, which had already shrunk by 30% from 2004 to 2015. 2019 survey According to the National Research Council of Italy and the International University. Researchers predicted that glaciers would disappear in 25 to 30 years.
Other experts say that up to half of the glaciers in the Alps could disappear by 2050, according to a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year. Irreversible loss of glaciers By the end of this century..
The result is disastrous for human life, the environment and the local economy. Melting is often changing the borders drawn along the lines of glaciers.
Italian politician Franco Narducci recently told Congress “climate change”, contributing to “glacier erosion and contraction” and forcing him to rethink how the country painted its borders.
The most notable example is the Rifugio Guide del Cervino, a traditional mountain lodge in the Penin Alps on the Swiss border near the Matterhorn. The melting of the glacier has moved many of the shelters to Switzerland, causing bureaucratic headaches for owners who want to stay in Italy and unexpected diplomatic headaches in both countries.
But now the pain is most severe in Kanazei, a town in the Trentino region of Italy behind the mountains.
On Tuesday, when reporters were waiting to take the regional president to a press conference, Deborah Campagnaro, whose sister Erica Campagnaro and her brother-in-law David Miotti were still missing, gathered in the press. Used to blame the local government. Because they did not install detection and warning devices that would prevent people from approaching the glacier.
“My brother-in-law was an alpine guide and a very expert,” she said. “If he had only signs of danger, he wouldn’t have gone with my sister. Her husband and wife wouldn’t have left their two children at home,” she said.
Given the heat of the previous day, Campagnaro said it was because someone didn’t do anything.But when she left the crowd and returned to the car, she said she had another person Criminal: “Climax”.
The grass field at the foot of the mountain was roped with police tape, leaving only the blue Dacia with a plate from the Czech Republic. The sun shimmered across the windshield in the bright sun, and a spare gray T-shirt and socks awaited behind me. It belonged to one of the mountain’s missing or dead, Fugatti said.
So far, only drones and helicopters have investigated the location of slides. The Italian National Alpine Cave Rescue Team believes that glaciers are unstable and too dangerous to explore on foot.
They also warned about the possibility of finding old ordinances.Glaciers served as the forefront of World War I Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary soldiers dug a tunnel deep in the ice, Italy. Glacier retreats sometimes exposed the remains of soldiers.
When technicians began to equip the area around the glacier with radar equipment to detect obstructions, they wore T-shirted hikers and sweaty water bottles on the trails below the mountains.
“Everyone feels it when the glacier melts, even below,” said Anna Lazari, 45, who came with her two children.
His brother Giampaolo Domidi, who has been hiking in the area for 40 years, said that temperature changes have been dramatic since he was young and that he was essentially wearing a fleece on his belt as a memorial to another era. rice field.
Domidi said he was “deeply worried” that the global warming could make his nephew and niece, who were sweating and exhausted next door, unable to understand the wonders of nature in which they grew up. ..
And on a winding road approaching the mountains and lakes supplied by the glaciers above, drivers got out of their car to see what the slides made.
“They will never find anyone,” said 74-year-old Egidio Nicorette, looking at the steep cliffs.
“Peace, maybe,” said motorcyclist Raymond Oberhofer, 70.
Nicolet said he and his wife had a villa nearby and skied on the glacier thirty years ago, even in the summer. “It was all snow and it was a completely different landscape,” he said. From their home, they could see the magnificent summit of Marmolada, but every year “it wasn’t always white,” he said.
He said the problem was everywhere, even in the province of Venice where he lives. The rain there was late. “In Venice,” he said. “We don’t even know what water is anymore.”
In the days before the deadly slide, Budel posted a video on social media. There are tens of thousands of followers there. “Poor Marmolada Glacier,” he wrote in the caption. “This year, this glacier will be hit like that.”
Sitting in a woolen hat thousands of feet below the shelter, he said the glaciers remained exposed due to the lack of snow during the winter, and in mid-June it was worse than last August. Stated.
“This tragedy makes us understand that climate change exists, but unfortunately it happened on Sunday at 2:00 pm, the worst time and day possible,” he said. .. “Otherwise, if it happened during the week and wasn’t a tragedy, we wouldn’t even talk about it.”