Storms hampered the search for more than a dozen missing hikers on Monday a day after a large chunk of an alpine glacier in Italy calved, sending an avalanche of ice, snow and rock down the slope.
The authorities have recognized, so far, seven deaths. “I hope the numbers stop here,” said Veneto Governor Luca Zaia, whose region in northeastern Italy borders the Dolomites mountain range, including the Marmolada glacier.
Another regional leader, Maurizio Fugatti, said 14 people were still missing as of Monday afternoon. “We were contacted by families because these people did not return home,” said Fugatti from the alpine region of Trentino-Alto Adige.
At least three of the dead were Italian, authorities said. News reports said that one of the deceased was from the Czech Republic.
“This is a drama that certainly has some unpredictability. But what happened “is certainly the result of environmental deterioration and the climatic situation,” the Italian prime minister said.
The Marmolada Glacier has been shrinking for decades, and scientists at the government research center have said it will be gone in 25 to 30 years.
The detached portion of the glacier was enormous, estimated at 200 meters wide, 80 meters high and 60 meters deep. Experts compared the avalanche to a “block of ice the size of an apartment building with debris and cyclopean masses of rock.”
Italy is in the midst of a weeks-long heat wave, and alpine rescuers said the temperature at the glacier’s altitude last week exceeded 10 C (50 F) when it normally should be below freezing in this time of year. Scientists are racing to find out how fast.
It was not immediately known what caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts to be around 300 kph. But high temperatures were widely cited as a likely factor.
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar sciences researcher at Italy’s state research center CNR, noted that the long heat wave, which lasted between May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy in that period for almost twenty years. “It is absolutely an anomaly,” he said in an interview on Italian television on Monday.
