Heat suffocates the Alps too: freezing level rises above 5,000 metres

If we want to understand why mountains and glaciers risk becoming increasingly unstable and with dramatic extreme events like those of the last few hours, we must also look at a specific piece of data: the freezing level . The atmospheric altitude at which the air temperature reaches 0 degrees "normally" in summer is on average around 3,200 meters in the North.

But since, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has just declared , extreme heat is "the new normal", the intensity of heat waves is also changing the freezing level values, bringing them to records never seen before, for example in Italy, for the month of June.

While waiting to understand whether, as many experts claim, it is a record even higher than the dramatic summer of 2003, in the last few hours the Air Force measurements of Pratica di Mare have recorded the freezing level in Italy at 5547 meters above sea level.

An unimaginable value for June.

It is difficult to imagine what happened on Mont Blanc where for over 24 hours the temperature never fell below zero degrees at an altitude of 4,750 meters. The Arpa Valle d'Aosta weather station, an area today deeply affected by landslides, floods and damage from extreme weather events, confirms it: at times it even reached around 6 degrees above 4,700. On Monte Rosa instead the column reached +6.4°C at 4,554 meters at Capanna Margherita.

Marmolada, the death of a glacier: video from the drone

This week the freezing level should return to lower altitudes, around 4000-4200 meters, while in the Alpine and Apennine arc more intense phenomena are expected, also given the accumulated humidity, which could cause serious difficulties in the mountain areas.

Territories where the impact of high temperatures, which Guterres claims represent the "new normal", are already visible to the naked eye: the glaciers are the ones suffering the most.

A lake appears on Mont Blanc

At Punta Helbronner on Mont Blanc, for example, the heat caused a lake to form on the glacier, while on the Lares glacier in the Adamello Park , on days when temperatures reached 30 degrees, chasms opened up and various passages formed where the ice melted and water flowed copiously.

Glaciers that are starting, even on our side, to have "holes like Gruyere cheese" recently declared the expert Matthias Huss, of the glacier monitoring group Glamos , referring to the Swiss ones in the Alps in extreme difficulty due to the climate crisis.

Guterres: “The Planet is Getting Warmer”

A fate that could soon also concern our white giants in extreme difficulty in a context of very high freezing levels and increasingly frequent extreme temperatures. After all, as Guterres comments, "the Planet is becoming increasingly warm and dangerous and no country is immune to this", the only way out, "is to have more ambition, now, on climate action".