Rescuers yesterday were to resume the search for survivors after an avalanche set off by the collapse of the largest glacier in the Italian Alps killed at least six people and injured eight others.
Authorities said they did not know “the total number of climbers” hit when the glacier collapsed on Sunday on Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Italian Dolomites.
The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10°C was recorded at the glacier’s summit.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“An avalanche of snow, ice and rock hit an access path at a time when there were several roped parties, some of whom were swept away,” emergency services spokeswoman Michela Canova said.
Six people had been confirmed dead and eight were injured, she said, while “the total number of climbers involved is not yet known.”
Two of the injured were taken to hospital in Belluno, another in a more serious condition was taken to Treviso and five to Trento.
She did not specify the nationalities of the victims, but Italian media reported that foreign nationals were among them.
The Alpine rescue corps has activated a toll-free number for people to report friends or relatives who had not returned from an excursion to the glacier.
Several helicopters were scrambled to take part in the initial rescue operation, but the search for survivors had to be suspended at nightfall and resumed early yesterday.
Rescuers in the nearby Veneto region of northeast Italy said they had deployed all their Alpine teams, including sniffer dogs.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi expressed his “sincerest condolences” to the victims and their families on Twitter.
Massimo Frezzotti, a science professor at Roma Tre University, said that the collapse was caused by unusually warm weather linked to climate change, with precipitation down 40 to 50 percent during a dry winter.
“The current conditions of the glacier correspond to mid-August, not early July,” he said.
Images filmed from a refuge close to the incident show snow and rock hurtling down the mountain’s slopes and causing a thunderous noise.
Other footage shot by tourists on their smartphones showed the grayish avalanche sweep away everything in its path.
The mountain rescue team released images showing rescuers and helicopters at the scene to take victims from the valley to the village of Canazei.
Their task was made harder because the bodies were trapped under a layer of ice and rock.
A team of psychologists was on hand to support the relatives of the victims. The Trento public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation to determine the causes of the tragedy.
Experts quoted by the Corriere della Sera said that they feared further collapses of ice.
Glacier specialist Renato Colucci told the Italian agency AGI that the phenomenon was “bound to repeat itself,” because “for weeks the temperatures at altitude in the Alps have been well beyond normal values.”
The warm temperatures had produced a large quantity of water from the melting glacier that accumulated at the bottom of the block of ice and caused it to collapse, he said.
The Marmolada glacier is the largest in the Dolomites, which is part of the Italian Alps and situated on the northern face of Marmolada. The glacier, nicknamed “the queen of the Dolomites” feeds the Avisio River and overlooks Lake Fedaia in the autonomous Italian province of Trento.
A report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in March said that melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats caused by global warming, disrupting ecosystems and infrastructure.
The panel has said that glaciers in Scandinavia, central Europe and the Caucasus could lose between 60 and 80 percent of their mass by the end of the century.
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