Nine others were injured when the avalanche was unleashed from the Marmolada Glacier on Sunday afternoon when dozens of hikers were on excursions, some of them on ropes. Trento prosecutor Sandro Raimondi said 17 hikers were initially believed to be missing, Italian news agency LaPresse reported. But later, state broadcaster RAI reported from the scene that the number of missing had dropped to 15 after authorities were able to locate some of those feared missing. The detached block of ice was massive, estimated at 200 meters wide, 80 meters high and 60 meters deep. Governor Luca Zaia, whose Veneto region in northeastern Italy borders the Marmolada region, likened the avalanche to an “apartment house (sized) block of ice with debris and cyclopean masses of rock.” “I can’t say anything other than the facts, and the facts tell us that high temperatures are not conducive to these situations,” Zaya told reporters. Italy is in the grip of a weeks-long heat wave and Alpine rescuers said the temperature at the top of the glacier last week exceeded 10C (50F) when it should normally be near freezing at this time of year. An ice rink in the Dolomite mountain resort town of Canazei served as a makeshift morgue to locate the dead, a task made more difficult and gruesome because rescuers said in some cases body parts were found scattered over a wide area. At least four bodies brought to the rink had been identified by Monday afternoon. RAI said three of those identified were Italian, including an experienced Alpine guide. Another was a hiker whose relatives said he had just sent a selfie of himself from the slope just before the avalanche came down. One of the dead was from the Czech Republic, RAI said. According to media reports, the missing include several Italians, three Romanians, one with French citizenship, another from Austria and four from the Czech Republic. Raimondi is quoted as saying that two of the wounded are German. Zaia told reporters that one of the Germans was a 65-year-old man. Of the patients he was so badly injured, so far identification was impossible. Drones were used to search for any of the missing as well as verify security. Sixteen cars remained unaccounted for in the area’s parking lot, and authorities tried to locate the occupants through license plates. It was not clear how many of the cars may have belonged to the already identified victims or the injured, who were airlifted to hospitals on Sunday. What caused a peak of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts at about 300 km/h (nearly 200 mph) was not immediately known. But high temperatures were widely cited as a possible factor. Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at Italy’s state-run research center CNR, noted that the long heat wave, spanning May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy at that time for almost 20 years. “It is absolutely an anomaly,” Gabrieli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it would be impossible to predict when or if a serac — a peak from the outcrop of a glacier — might break off, as it did on Sunday. Managers of rustic lodges along the mountainside said temperatures at 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) recently reached 24 degrees Celsius – unheard of in a place where hikers go in the summer to cool off. The glacier, in the Marmolada range, is the largest in the Dolomites mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski in this winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly in recent decades, with much of its volume gone. Experts at Italy’s state research center CNR, which has a polar science institute, estimated a few years ago that the glacier would disappear within 25-30 years. The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been labeled by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot”, likely to suffer heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences. Pope Francis, who has made caring for the planet a priority of his papacy, tweeted an invitation to pray for the avalanche victims and their families. “The tragedies we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently seek new ways that respect people and nature,” Francis wrote.
