In majestic Marmolada, the queen of Italy’s Dolomites, the first Sunday of July was a beautiful day for hikers – almost cloudless skies, 82 degrees Fahrenheit heat in the valley. But for the mountain, even the 50°F near the 11,000-foot peak was stifling. From its glacier, the largest in the range, a stretch the size of two football fields broke. Ice and debris fell with the force of a collapsing skyscraper. Eleven people – two of them experienced mountain guides – never made it home.
“I saw pictures of what it was like before the collapse and I would have taken my own son there that day,” says Alberto Silvestri, an Italian guide. For climbers and locals alike, the tragedy was a terrifying reminder of how much the mountains’ beauty masks their risks.
Mountain ranges cover a quarter of all land on the planet, and the millions of people who call them home have always lived with their natural hazards. But now, global warming is fundamentally changing its makeup. Its temperatures have risen up to 50% faster than the global average, and even as climbers climb the peaks of the Himalayas, climbers now swap out their expedition suits for lighter jackets – a small comfort amid heightened dangers.
Scientists who calculated the risks of natural disasters in the mountains, such as Perry Bartlet of the Federal Research Institute for Forests, Snow and Landscapes (WSL) in Switzerland, needed to update their models. “The scale of what we calculated has completely changed – the events are much larger,” he says.
Earlier this month, another glacier collapsed in Patagonia and Kyrgyzstan in July. As the permafrost thaws, rocks and soil, once constrained by sub-zero temperatures, are falling.
High-altitude hikers and foothill villagers are facing a vital question: As mountain conditions become more dangerous than ever, how can they keep themselves safe?
Looming disaster
It’s a question that plagues Roberto Rota, mayor of the mountain village of Courmayeur, situated on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest peak. Read also : Politics and the Future of Medical Education.
Tracing a path to the mouth of the Mont Blanc tunnel connecting Italy and France, the unstable slope of Monte de la Saxe could release so much rock and soil that it would be recorded by seismographs around the world. Above the village of Planpincieux, from two precariously suspended glaciers, enough ice to fill two Empire State buildings is in danger of collapsing. At worst, says Rota, “it would completely destroy all of Planpincieux”.
The responsibility weighs heavily on his shoulders, says Rota, and sometimes the former ski instructor wonders if he was crazy for running for the job. But he says the systems he, his predecessors and scientists have implemented help him sleep at night.
Ground-based radar intended for unstable peaks and slopes measures movement 24 hours a day – if the speed increases, so does the chance that it will decrease. Satellite and drone images are also analyzed. Rota receives a daily email at 2pm. with data and analysis. On good days, he sees a yellow box indicating a medium-level threat of glacier collapse.
On the worst days, the box is a deep red. Places like Guiliana Patellani remember. Two years ago, traffic lights along the road to Planpincieux changed to red, preventing people from moving into the potential disaster zone, and alerts appeared on people’s phones in potentially affected areas. Distressed officials knocked on the doors of his stone house, instructing Patellani and his family to pack their most cherished belongings and move to an emergency evacuation site.
After two nights, when the danger subsided, they returned. This summer, her sister’s husband, a glaciologist, called to cancel the visit. “He said that with the extreme heat, it’s very dangerous,” Patellani recalls.
But no one here seems worried. Residents have seen avalanches and rockslides before, says Patellani, and the house his grandmother built in 1936 has never been touched. “And we have the monitoring system,” says his teenage granddaughter, Cecilia, who spent the summer looking for mushrooms and blueberries.
Invisible hazard
But not everything can be avoided. In a stream just a few hundred meters from their home, the family shows me the destruction caused by a landslide, caused by heavy rains on a Friday night in August. To see also : The couple brings new business to Country Jam. A 6-meter-high wall of rock and boulders toppled two bridges, cutting through the village, and crushed the aqueduct, leaving 30,000 without drinking water.
“There will never be one hundred percent security,” says Fabrizio Troilo of the Secure Mountain Foundation. At its headquarters, radars monitored by the Aosta Valley are directed at the slope of Monte de la Saxe.
Further up the valley, Daniele Giordan, a geologist at Italy’s National Research Council, has spent the last 10 years perfecting the glacier monitoring system. Forecasts and scenarios are now so accurate that he and his colleagues are confident he is among the best in the world, perhaps a role model for others.
They fly by helicopter over the region’s 180 glaciers regularly, their eyes focused on new crevasses. They update a photo catalog to monitor their evolution and trek to glacial lakes they can break.
Of course, there are limits. The melt water accumulated inside the glacier is a major concern. This summer alone, several meters melted the surface of glaciers in the Alps, an amount so dramatic that it far surpassed scientists’ worst predictions to date. “These are all surface observations, but there are processes that we cannot see, because they occur inside the glacier,” says Giordan.
On the French side of Mont Blanc, Jean-Marc Peillex, the mayor of the resort town of Saint Gervais, knows how much destruction the hidden thaw can cause: in 1892, the water inside the Tête Rousse glacier had built up so much pressure that it exploded through the ice like a balloon.
The 131-foot wave carried ice, snow and all manner of debris, killing 200 people and leaving only the elementary school standing. After the catastrophe, authorities began drilling holes in the glacier almost every year, hoping the excess water would drain. For decades, nothing ever came out. In 2009, researchers tasked with verifying whether it would be safe to suspend the project found that they were simply drilling too high. Further down, 80,000 cubic meters, enough to fill 32 Olympic-sized swimming pools, were about to breach the glacier once again.
“It was pure luck that we found it in time,” says Peillex. The water now drains regularly – in the right spots – and if that fails, sensors hanging from ropes above the glacier would trigger a new alarm system. Residents would have 15 minutes to flee to higher altitudes.
On Europe’s deadliest mountain
Keeping the 20,000 people who try to climb Mont Blanc each year safe has been Peillex’s second headache. Perceived as an easy hike, the peak has turned into a bucket list item for inexperienced hikers. This may interest you : Massachusetts public health officials confirm 18 new cases of monkeypox. It also holds the record for mortality in the mainland’s mountains, with around 100 people dying each year.
When even nighttime temperatures at the peak were above freezing this summer, rockfalls, already the leading cause of death, increased in frequency. The mountain had become very unpredictable. Local guide associations canceled summit trips and authorities issued warnings. Peillex proposed that anyone still trying to reach the summit should deposit €15,000, enough to cover rescue efforts and a funeral service. While this was never implemented, before the end of July, high-altitude mountain huts such as the 12,516-foot Goûter Refuge were closing. Without shelter or guides, the two-day trip became nearly impossible.
However, about a dozen people a day were still trying, says Tsering Sherpa of the “Blanche Brigade” sent by Saint Gervais to patrol the routes to the summit. Hikers without crampons, ice picks, warm jackets or a reserve for the busy havens were routinely asked to turn around.
When I visited in early September, the weather had cooled and the shelters had just reopened. In the office of the Saint Gervais Mountain Guide Company, one of the oldest in the world, a group of young doctors from the University Hospital of Montpellier, France, were planning the final preparations for the summit, excited by the chance to reach the peak.
They were cautious, taking a four-day prep course where they got used to high altitudes and practiced using ice picks and cramped walks. These courses are increasingly popular, and guides say they see customers are more aware of the risks.
But this summer, conditions were so unstable that even veteran climbers struggled to make their climbs. Alpine rescue organizations were busier than ever. For hundreds of missions, they were only able to rescue the bodies of climbers, many killed by landslides on terrain that others had reported as stable just days earlier. Austria’s tiny province of Salzburg alone has reported 24 deaths so far this year. “That’s more deaths than we’ve ever had. Even for the most professional climbers, it has become very challenging,” says mountain rescuer and dog handler Maria Riedler.
The unwritten rules that kept mountaineers safe for generations no longer apply. The Grand Couloir crossings of Mont Blanc, a 30-second pass prone to cave-ins, used to be considered safer early in the morning. In July of this year, boulders were falling 24 hours a day.
“The mountains will definitely become more and more dangerous,” says Pietro Picco, a guide who grew up at the foot of the Mont Blanc massif. Certain routes are no longer feasible. In others, the skill level required has increased and guides are getting smaller and smaller groups as a result.
“If you want to climb a certain summit, you need to be 100% flexible” over time, Picco says. He and other guides predict that the season for climbing peaks like Mont Blanc will end in July and maybe start again for a few more weeks in September. And increasingly, when a summit is unsafe, hikers will have to choose alternative climbs or opt for cycling, rock climbing or canyoning.
In Courmayeur, Mayor Rota is working on a new set of pictograms that would alert people. He envies the mayors of Italy’s coast, where a single red flag keeps tourists out of the water.
Peillex also wants the risks to be taken more seriously. The glacier’s alarm system cost $7 million, but when a storm accidentally set it off, only about a fifth of residents were evacuated.
“It’s a shame because after all this effort to protect people, they don’t take the last step to protect themselves,” he says, standing in front of dozens of new homes built right in the area where the 1892 avalanche of ice and snow overtook the height of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Today, it would kill not 200, but 2,000 people. “We have to understand that nature is stronger than we are,” he says, “and that we are the ones who have to change our ways.”
