A Deadly Mix From Italy to India and Beyond: Extreme Heat and High Ice

The dramatic collapse of an enormous slab of ice at a popular mountain destination in Italy's Dolomites is just part of a widespread alpine unraveling

Jul 05, 2022

Track my companion live video webcasts at the Columbia Climate School Sustain What page.

July 12 - On my Sustain What webcast segment on the deadly avalanche in the Italian Dolomites, the ice-dynamics researcher Favien Beaud noted the good odds for more icefall events given the early heat this summer across much of Europe. Sure enough, just such an event occurred late last week in the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan and was filmed by a British hiker, Harry Shimmin. On Instagram, he wrote, "We’d just reached the highest point in the trek and I separated from the group to take pictures on top of a hill/cliff edge. While I was taking pictures I heard the sound of deep ice cracking behind me." Read the rest and watch here.

July 6 - The local prosecutor in the province where an ice avalanche killed at least seven people has opened an inquiry assessing potential criminal culpability, but told a radio interviewer "The unpredictability in this moment is the protagonist... To have responsibility you need to be able to foresee an event, which is very very difficult." (Italian media)

Original post, updates marked - Physics is so unforgiving - from the planetary heating forced by accumulating human-generated carbon dioxide to the melting point of ice to the brute force of gravity.

Don't amplify the hazard, and don't get in the way.

Record early-summer heat intensified by global warming likely contributed to the sudden and deadly descent on Sunday of a huge slab of ice that slid off the flank of Marmolada, at close to 11,000 feet tall the highest peak in the Dolomites mountain range in northeastern Italy - and the only one with the last vestige of a glacier.

Marmolada in 2016 (photo by Marco Bonomo, CCO)

The timing of the icefall couldn't have been worse, with two roped teams of visitors and guides among those swept away by the resulting avalanche on an otherwise beautiful afternoon.

Among the many astonishing and horrifying videos of the July 3rd calamity, the most stunning was by Carlo Budel, who manages a hikers' hut atop Marmolada and has long been a popular Instagram presence for his philosophically-captioned imagery charting season-by-season events. Given his penchant for poetic musings (he has a book out, "The Sentinel of the Dolomites") it's notable that Budel's video was posted only with prayer symbols.

Watch the full video on Instagram.

On Monday, Pope Francis echoed his sentiment, tweeting in Italian that all should pray for the victims and their families and adding a policy push: "The tragedies we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently seek new ways that respect people and nature."

As of today, authorities tallied seven dead, eight injured and 13 still missing. Keep track via the Facebook page of Italy's volunteer National Alpine and Speleological (cave) Rescue Corps. The video above was posted by this extraordinary organization, which was back on the fields of fallen ice, rubble and snow Tuesday scouring for hints of life after summer thunderstorms prevented a search much of yesterday. Also track the official updates on the website of the Province of Trento.

The trauma is particularly acute for the Alpine rescue group and the wider community of mountain professionals because those confirmed killed include Paolo Dani, a longtime leader in the rescue organization. Read this Facebook post for more.

Questions abound, as is always the case after an abrupt tragedy. What was the role of Europe's extreme early-season heat wave and global warming? Could there have been a warning? What might happen there or elsewhere in Europe's (or the rest of the world's) overheated mountains this summer and in the years ahead?

The same is true after any abrupt calamity - and there've been so many of this sort as climate change heats high mountain repositories of ice even as human enterprises, from tourism to hydroelectric dams, expand on mountain slopes below. I began writing about mountain ice, global warming and people in harm's way in 1995. (Read "A Farewell to Ice" in the readings and resources section below.)

Having been through this tragic and challenging drill far too many times as a journalist, I offer one bit of advice if you care about clarity.

Be patient.

If you've followed me awhile, you may recall I ran a live Sustain What session in February 2021 with Himalayan journalists after a massive slab of rock and ice plummeted into a gorge, sending a wall of debris and water downstream and killing more than 200 people as it demolished Indian hydropower projects and villages. A thorough paper published in the journal Science in July that year clarified the mix of factors both causing the rockfall and, separately, the devastating losses. And yes, climate change is in the mix.

Water under ice

In recent days, mountain guides in the Dolomites had noted the sound of running water around and under the last shield of glacial ice clinging to the flank of the mountain - part of which was the mass that gave way abruptly on Sunday.

It's no surprise given the extraordinary heat across much of Italy in recent weeks. The week before the ice collapse, much of Italy experience temperatures topping 104 degrees Fahrenheit, as the Washington Post reported on June 28. A scorching air mass flowing from North Africa was key.

Italy and surrounding regions will see a brief break in the heat, according to Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures around the world (@extremetemps). But another extremely hot pulse is coming later this month, he says.

On Monday, I interviewed Marika Favé, who's been a guide in the Dolomites for 16 years and climbing there for 25. I asked her about a June 30 Facebook post and video by Carlo Budel, who manages a hikers' hut near atop Marmolada and has long been a popular Instagram presence for his philosophically-captioned imagery charting season-by-season events. He showed the water flows and worried about the erosion of the ice. (The post has since evidently been deleted but the video and audio were tweeted here.)

You can watch the full interview below, but here's Favé's reply:

"Yeah, absolutely. Like never before, this year, you could see and hear the water running on the ice. When I was there five or six days ago, we were working some exercise and you were wet already from the morning. Everything was wet - a lot of water running on the glacier, on the ice, a lot of water. I’ve never seen so much water like this year. So I would say this glacier is getting a little bit back every year. But this year, wow. This year, it’s going to be much worse."

Initial informal scientific assessments tend to support this. In the hours after the catastrophe, the Alpine Adriatic Meteorological Society posted a couple of observations, including this one with aerial video:

"Water lubrication at the base (or interstrata) and increased pressure in water-filled crevasses are probably the main causes for this catastrophic event."

The organization added this analysis:

Bottom detachment of part of the Serac from the route "Pancia dei finazieri" confirmed. The glacier destabilized at its base due to the [l]arge availability of melting water after weeks of extremely high and above average temperature.

In images released by officials, you can see what looks like a portal for meltwater from a crevasse to the granite slab beneath the gap that exists where the great ice wedge broke free (the dark areas):

But it's way too soon to debate whether the event could have been forecast and the region closed to hikers.

This kind of rapid-fire after-the-fact blame game is commonplace in abrupt complex tragedies. I was in the middle of such debates after the midair destruction of TWA Flight 800, for example. It happened in Italy when seven earthquake scientists were convicted of manslaughter after a deadly temblor. Six convictions eventually were overturned and seventh was cleared of the manslaughter charge.

Marco Budel has spent the last few days refuting press accounts implying that his early social media posts about meltwater under the ice meant there could have been a warning. An interview with the Italian publication La Repubblica published today captures his feelings:

"There are people who spread the message that someone didn't do their duty. It's not like that. What happened was neither predictable nor preventable. That’s why I say, don’t blame anyone, we’re not looking for a scapegoat. But we have to be aware that we have a collective guilt for the way we are treating our planet."

I agree with Budel. I tweeted another version of this plea of his:

On Monday, Luca Biagini, a former head of alpine guides in the area, told Reuters the collapse was "unpredictable, nothing could have led us to expect something like this.... He added that the high temperatures were an important factor but there had been hotter seasons in the past, including a record-breaking summer in 2003."

Knowledgable scientists are already digging on the technicalities of the icefall via Twitter and, I'm sure, will soon start a post-mortem resulting in peer-reviewed publications like those on the Himalayan disaster.

I've tried to use Twitter to help spur constructive discussion over whether the ice wedge that broke off was a serac - as almost all press accounts have described it - or a more complex feature. This matters because seracs - freestanding masses of ice created where crevasses intersect - are well understood to be dangerous. It turns out, no surprise, this is a complicated question!

Here are two Twitter threads to watch:

Inserted 4pm ET | Flavien Beaud, a postdoctoral researcher in glaciology and related sciences at the University of British Columbia, posted a fantastic response to my tweeted query above. You can follow the thread here but I'm posting the text in full:

"It is true that the hazard is hard to identify here and that we cannot accurately predict such an event. Typically, ice avalanches are expected from ice cliffs or hanging glaciers (glaciers perched on top of a cliff). However, in recent years scientists have found that entire glaciers can detach and that a steep slope is not required."

Beaud cites this hauntingly relevant study:

read the paper

He continues: "For Marmolada glacier, in retrospect, the ingredients were combined for an ice fall, steep glacier with a slope break at the bed and a crevasse forming over that slope break. But before the ice avalanche, the glacier smoothed out the bed and the top of the crevasse was largely filled with snow (seen in 2nd pictures). What this means is that we are facing is new, but not necessarily unexpected."

Here's a zoomed-in section of that second photograph, which offers a side view of the area left when the massive half disk of ice broke free:

Where are other icefall danger zones?

Finally, I'm glad to see news media and social media helping to spread another key question: where are there other icefall hot spots needing a closer look?

As I wrote in my 1995 Traveler story, there's been a big shift around alpine regions to summer tourism as winter snow has become more fickle. That likely means more heat waves around high ice in places with lots of people - the core recipe for a disaster - a growing hazard combined with exposed, vulnerable populations:

In my chat with the Dolomites guide Marika Favé I asked about this: "Maybe the summer climbing is something to be concerned about more going forward?"

Her answer was that alpine tourism, once again, needs to adapt, making sure to avoid spots with summer ice. This won't be easy but it is doable, she said.

"It's gonna be really hard. I was in Saas-Fee [Switzerland] two weeks ago and with three other mountain guides from France we climbed Allalinhorn [a 13,000-foot peak]. Allalinhorn is supposed to be a really quiet and easy and safe climb on the glacier. But since we had to bring up like 80 women the day after we said it's not safe at all.

"All the bridges on the crevasses were so soft. I fell down through my waist in a crevasse once. The other French guides fell. We were roped there, so I was also tangled on this crevasse twice. So we just decided to change the goal. So the day after, instead of doing Allalinhorn, we climbed the Breithorn, which was okay. Allalinhorn is known to be a really easy and safe climb. But now it's closed.

"I think this has never happened. So all the glacier on the abs are suffering a lot. I'm expecting more more glacier will be closed."

As was the case near the vanishing Aletsch glacier in 1995 when I interviewed the Swiss resort owner Art Furrer, this all still means a long "farewell to ice."

Here's that 1995 Conde Nast Traveler story on the vanishing of Switzerland's fabled glaciers under the force of climate change and an image of that ice retreat in the last five decades:

Parting shots

Some of the videos of the icefall and avalanche captured from a distance have a surreally horrifying quality when coupled with the knowledge of what was unfolding on the slopes:

Social flow

I belatedly saw and tweeted a Reuters story with an incredibly poignant and sobering observation by Giovanni Baccolo, who works on the glacier analysis team at Milano-Bicocca University. Speaking of the fragility of the last glacial remnant on Marmolada, he said, "It is a kind of climatic fossil, glaciers like the Marmolada are considered 'placid', they are expected to just retreat."