Measuring the retreat of Italy’s largest glacier

BRESCIA - The Adamello glacier, the largest in the Italian Alps, is slowly being destroyed by global warming, with experts giving it less than a century to survive.

“From the end of the 19th century until today, the glacier has lost approximately 2.7km,” said Mr Cristian Ferrari, president of the Glaciological Commission of the Tridentine Alpinists Society.

“In the last five years, we have had average losses of 15m per year. But last year alone we saw the loss of 139m in a year.”

Every summer for the past four years, Italian environmental association Legambiente has organised a journey across the Alps to illustrate the effects of climate change on glaciers.

Like other Alpine glaciers, the Adamello is suffering from reduced snowfall – down 50 per cent in 2022.

The snow cover is thinner, and longer and hotter summers give it less time to freeze.

The glacier is also splitting, proving more surface area exposed to the hot air.

It has also exposed traces of the mountains’ history, as the scene of fierce battles between Italian and Austro-Hungarian fighters during World War II.

Today, rifles and shell cases emerge from the melting ice.

“We read the traces of the past, we read the traces of the present, and we recognise that the trend is not positive,” said Associate Professor Marco Giardino, vice-president of the Italian Glaciological Committee and a professor at Turin university.

“Because the blocks that we see fall today will transform that part of the glacier into a glacier covered with debris, and it will destabilise the side of the mountain.”

Legambiente’s annual “caravan” through the mountains, involving scientists and environmentalists, has covered several glaciers in the past four years.

“Last year we wanted to return to the glaciers we observed two years previously, and the change that we saw was incredible,” said its manager for the Alps, Ms Vanda Bonario.

Last year was marked by drought and heat, “but we saw situations that I couldn’t have imagined”.

The Forni glacier in Lombardy, for example, had retreated by more than 100m, she said.

“They (glaciers) truly convey to us an incredible impression of how climate change has accelerated, of the intensity of events, that is, everything is moving quickly.”

According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, temperatures in this part of the Alps will increase between 1 deg C and 3 deg C in 2050 and between 3 deg C and 6 deg C by the end of the century.

At this rate, the Adamello glacier could disappear before the end of the century. AFP