Italy’s largest glacier, the Adamello, is melting at a worrying speed. When I heard this, my initial and admittedly foolish thought was “Italy has glaciers?” I’d always associated glaciers with the North and South Pole and the vast wastes of Alaska – not Italy. How can a country with 47C summers possibly have glaciers?
But of course it does. The Alps and the Dolomites have huge expanses of ice. Cristian Ferrari is president of the Glaciological Commission of the Tridentine Mountaineers Society, the organisation in charge of monitoring glaciers in Italy’s high alpine regions. The picture he paints of the Adamello glacier, the largest in Italy, was deeply worrying.
“There’s not much hope really,” Ferrari tells me. “Over the last 10 years, the glacier has consistently lost so much water and nothing has been added.”
It shouldn’t come as a shock; the past two years have been unbearably hot in Italy. Last summer, Sicily experienced a drought like never before, forcing farmers to kill their livestock and causing Lake Pergusa (Sicily’s only natural lake) to dry up completely.
Further, 2023 was a brutal summer, with temperatures hitting 48C, just a mere 8C below America’s Death Valley.
“In the five years before 2022, we measured on average a melting rate of 15 metres per year,” Ferrari says. “But last year when it was really hot, we measured 139 metres of melting. The difference is astronomical.”
Precipitation levels are significantly lower, too. According to the Superior Institute of Environmental Protection and Research, ISPRA, precipitation fell by 4% last year compared with the years 1991-2000.
This lack of precipitation, Ferrari says, is a huge issue for glaciers as they depend on fresh snowfall for stability. But for the last two years, snowfall has become increasingly rare across Italy’s peaks, meaning that some ski resorts have had to start using artificial snow cannons to stay open.
It’s little wonder, then, that the Adamello glacier is starting to shrink. The block of ice itself is 240 metres thick, but since the 19th century, drawn-out, hot summers and thinning snow have pushed the ice sheet back by 2.7km. Ferrari says the expectation is that it will vanish completely at some point between 2060 and 2100.
“Another reason why it’s a problem is that now there are more landslides in Italy. If the Adamello completely goes, what would there be in place to prevent such a thing? It does make you question what will happen next.”
When I ask him about other glaciers in Italy, he tells me that pretty much all the others in the Alps and the Dolomites are also melting. The lowest ones will disappear the quickest.
In 2022, an 80m-wide section of the Marmolada glacier in the Trentino Dolomites snapped off. The ensuing avalanche of ice and rock killed 11 people and generated such force that it registered on earthquake detection equipment. According to experts, that very glacier is set to liquefy completely in the next 25 to 30 years – that’s even sooner than the Adamello.
“If this glacier goes, there’ll be a real problem,” Ferrari concludes. “It’s a source of water, and without it I cannot imagine what would happen to our rivers and streams – and to our ecosystem.”
Jessica Lionnel is a freelance journalist based in Rome
