Marmolada glacier is shrinking

 Researchers warn that Italy’s Marmolada Glacier may disappear by 2040 as a result of global warming

The 3,343-meter Marmolada, known as the “Queen of the Dolomites,” is losing between 7 and 10 cm's of ice every day. In the past five years, it lost the equivalent of 98 football pitches. The Marmolada glacier, the highest glacier of the Dolomites and an UNESCO World Heritage site, is disappearing and could melt away completely by as early as 2040. The Marmolada Glacier in Italy's Dolomite mountains has dropped in surface area from 92 hectares down to 83 hectares, losing nine hectares in a single year due to intense summer heat waves. The 3,343-meter glacier, located in the Alps mountain range in northeastern Italy and also known as the “Queen of the Dolomites,” is disappearing at a rate of between 7 and 10 cm's a day, a recent assessment has revealed. It lost around 50% of its original surface in the past century and another 50% in the past decade. Since 2019, the glacier shrank by an additional 70 hectares or the equivalent of 98 football pitches. Recent data shared by researchers from the University of Padua, the Veneto environmental protection agency (ARPAV), and the Italian Glaciological Foundation highlights an alarming acceleration in the melting of the highest glacier in the Dolomites. The area covered by ice has fallen from 92 hectares to 83 over the past 12 months. It stood at 100 in 2023. Some of the important factors are as follows:-

The ice retreated by an average of about 23 meters this summer alone.

Dropped by 9 hectares in one year, shrinking the total area from 92 to 83 hectares.

The glacier loses between 7 and 10 cm's of ice depth daily during peak summer conditions.

Researchers warn that if current extreme summer melting patterns continue, the entire glacier could disappear in roughly next one decade. 

The trend is negative. This is because the Marmolada glacier is retreating and shrinking. Compared with last year, its area has decreased by 9 hectares and is ‘a long way’ from the 100 hectares recorded in 2023. on the western flank, a retreat of 120 metres has been recorded over two years. This is what has emerged from the eighth edition of the participatory glaciological campaign on the Marmolada, promoted by the Museum of Geography at the University of Padua, which involved collaboration between researchers from the University of Padua, ARPAV, the Italian Glaciological Foundation, students and volunteer members of the public from four different regions. ‘The 2026 campaign,’ the organisers emphasise, ‘has enabled us to collect up-to-date data, which is essential for continuing to monitor what remains of the Dolomites’ main glacier and for better understanding the impact of climate change at a local level.’ In 2020, the environmental group and the international commission for the protection of the Alps (Cipra) launched the campaign Caravana dei Ghiacciai (Caravan of Glaciers) in partnership of the Italian Glacier Committee. Speaking with reporters after their latest expedition, the team of scientists behind the campaign said the Marmolada is a “suffering glacier” in an “irreversible coma.” The melting ice, they explained, is leaving a desert of white flat rock behind.

The data collected this year, as Mauro Varotto, a lecturer in the Department of Historical, Geography and Classical Studies and the campaign’s scientific lead, “exacerbate the trend already evident in recent decades, setting a new record low for the glacier’s area loss: in one year, it has lost 9 hectares, falling to a total of 83 hectares compared with 92 last year”. ‘This is a record loss that we had previously recorded only in 2022,’ he emphasises, citing the results of the analysis of satellite imagery carried out by Francesco Ferrarese, ‘following the tragic collapse of the glacier. If summers like the one just passed continue, the glacier could have only about ten years left.” Around thirty people, aged between 16 and 75, took part in the monitoring activities carried out on the glacier, including experienced hikers, teachers, as well as ordinary enthusiasts and curious onlookers. ‘Overall, measurements at the glacier’s front show a retreat three times greater than last year, 23 metres on average,’ emphasises Giovanni Benetton, who has been in charge of measurements for the Italian Glaciological Foundation since this year, and the most dramatic situation is at the western front, where at one measuring point we recorded a retreat of 120 metres in two years, with the front now at an altitude of over 2,900 metres. The glacier is completely devoid of residual snow, and the only snow remaining is now that beneath the geotextile tarpaulins.

“[W]e have recounted the suffering of a dying glacier, marked by an acceleration of the melting process that has impressive numbers and that requires urgent responses starting from sustainable governance of the territory,” said Vanda Bonardo, national Alpine Coordinator for Legambiente and President of Cipra. But this, she explained, is just the latest example of how the climate crisis is impacting the Alps, one of Europe’s highest and most extensive mountain ranges. “The Alps are a fundamental place at a national and European level, but they are also increasingly fragile due to the advancing climate crisis,” said Bonardo. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that temperatures in the Alps will rise by 1-3C by 2050. “The summer of 2026 turned out to be the hottest at high altitude in the Dolomites since at least 1991, surpassing even that of 2003 in terms of duration and average temperatures,” comments Gianni Marigo of Arpav. Taking August as an example, the deviation from the average was more than 3 degrees Celsius. During that month, at the Arpav Punta Rocca station on the Marmolada at 3,250 metres, a sub-zero minimum (-0.6°C absolute value) was observed on only three days, and no day was recorded with a sub-zero average temperature.” Not only that: ‘The intense glacier ablation processes have thus continued,’ he continues, ‘and there were no snowfalls even at the highest altitudes; similarly, the degradation of the permafrost has continued, and at the Piz Boè station there is no frozen ground at any depth.’ Alberto Lanzavecchia of the University of Padua highlighted the educational aspect of the campaign and, at the same time, the importance of the glaciers. 

And thus the importance of monitoring the site, one of the 150 that the Italian Glaciological Foundation ‘monitors’ each year. “‘2026 is proving to be a record year even on an Alpine scale, with losses in glacier thickness in this region tripling compared to the average of the last decade and winter snow having already melted away by the end of July, weeks earlier than usual,’ concludes Aldino Bondesansi, the regional manager for the Triveneto area. In mid-August, in Marmolada, surveys showed that the crevasses upstream of the 2022 detachment niche were filled with melt water, the very same condition that our studies had identified as the cause of the collapse.” Severe summer temperatures in the Alps caused winter snowpacks to melt completely weeks ahead of schedule by the end of July. Freezing levels frequently surpassed 4,000 meters, leaving even high-altitude stations without negative average temperatures for weeks. Meltwater pooling inside glacial crevasses continues to weaken the internal structure of the remaining ice, raising concerns similar to those that preceded the tragic 2022 collapse.

Scientists have repeatedly warned that the largest glaciers in the Alps, namely the Adamello and Forni, are experiencing similar challenges. The Forni Glacier is losing ice at a rate comparable to that of the Marmolada. Meanwhile, long-term measurements of the 3,539-meter Adamello indicate that its current surface is primarily composed of snowfall from the 1980s, highlighting the significant and ongoing decline in glacial mass. Since the end of the 19th century, the Adamello glacier has retreated by approximately 2.7 km's. 68% of the world’s glaciers are set to disappear at the current global warming rate, with at least half of the loss taking place in the next 30 years, a 2023 study revealed. By 2100, central Europe, western Canada and the US will have no glaciers left. Even under the most optimistic scenario of 1.5C of global warming set out in the Paris Agreement, 49% of the planet’s glaciers, not including the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, would still melt completely, the study said.

Around 10% of the world’s land surface is currently covered by glaciers, which store 70% of the Earth’s freshwater. Melting glaciers contribute significantly to sea level rise. Between 2000 and 2019, meltwater from glacier and ice sheet loss alone accounted for 21% of the global sea level rise. Glacial melting also threaten water supplies for up to 2 billion people and increase the risk of natural hazards and extreme weather events such as flooding. With global warming and rising temperatures, these massive ice bodies are retreating at unprecedented rates. Between 1994 and 2017, glaciers worldwide lost nearly 30 trillion tons of ice and they are now melting at a rate equivalent to 1.2 trillion tons a year. Among the glaciers that are disappearing the fastest are those located in the Alps, Iceland and Alaska. 

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New Form of Ice at more than 2,000 °C

A new form of Ice created at more than 2,000 °C by Scientists 

Water is one of the most commonplace, essential substances in the human world. Ice comes in more forms than what you’ll find in a freezer or a glacier. Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity. But if just considered as a liquid, water is extremely weird, behaving in ways completely at odds with other liquids. It becomes less dense when it freezes. Its surface tension is bizarrely high. So is its boiling point. And, based on its molecular weight, it should be a gas at room temperature. We literally can't function without its properties as a near-universal solvent. It falls from the sky. We bathe in it, drink it, and immerse ourselves in it for fun. And that's all at normal, ambient Earth conditions. Tweak the pressure and the temperature a few notches, and water's outlandish behavior gets even more out of hand.

Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet, under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). At those temperatures, you'd normally expect water to emphatically be a gas, even partially sundered into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. But something interesting happens at the astronomical pressures found deep inside planets. When water transitions from a liquid to a gas, or vapor, it expands. Under crushing pressures of millions of atmospheres, this expansion is stymied. Instead, water can remain extraordinarily dense, taking on exotic forms unlike any ice we encounter at Earth's surface. One of these is superionic ice, a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.

At slightly different sets of conditions, the arrangement of the oxygen atoms shifts into different configurations known as phases. There are some twenty-something known phases of water ice, a few of which become superionic under extreme conditions. Scientists are always looking for more. And it's not just weirdness for weirdness's sake. Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields. Ice is the name for any phase of water that is solid and crystalline, meaning that it has a repeating molecular structure. Over the past decade, computer simulations have predicted tens of thousands of possible forms of ice. Though uncommon on our planet, exotic ice may exist in off-Earth environments, from cold and amorphous comet tails to the hot and crushing cores of icy planets. Ice comes in many more forms than the cubes in your water glass. Scientists have found many phases of ice, and according to simulations, there could be many more out there.

In a new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets. They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level, the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice. What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. The name refers to the arrangement of the oxygen atoms. Imagine you're packing identical balls in layers; there are a number of different ways those layers can be stacked while packing the balls as tightly as possible.

One previously identified form of superionic ice has a face-centered cubic, or fcc, structure. In the newly identified hcp ice, the layers are stacked in a different sequence. The researchers found evidence that one can transform into the other as the layers shift position. This transformation seems to occur as conditions grow more extreme. The conditions under which the researchers observed the new hcp ice phase (filled triangles and filled circles) show its emergence at extreme pressures and temperatures. At 155 gigapascals and 2,000 kelvins, the signal observed from the X-ray probe was a mix of fcc and hcp. Dialing up to 197 gigapascals and 2,250 kelvins, the hcp signature became stronger relative to fcc. By the final set of conditions, 219 gigapascals and 2,630 kelvins, the fcc signature had almost vanished, and hcp clearly dominated. Intriguingly, this may not have been the first time the researchers had produced hcp ice. Looking back at data from an earlier experiment, they realized that a previously unidentified X-ray diffraction peak observed above 130 gigapascals was likely the signature of hcp ice – they just hadn't recognized it at the time. The results suggest that, at pressures above around 200 gigapascals, hcp may become the more stable arrangement of superionic ice.

It seems like a relatively small change, literally on the atomic scale, but the difference could mean big things for the Solar System. If hcp ice conducts electricity differently from fcc ice, its presence deep inside Uranus and Neptune could change models of how material and electrical charge move through their interiors, processes thought to be involved in generating the planets' strange, messy, lopsided magnetic fields. We don't actually know about the properties of hcp ice yet, though. The stuff has only just been discovered. Water is really weird, and superionic ice is even weirder. Scientists have only just scratched the surface of what this strange molecule can do; in a way, it feels fitting that we need to rely on it to stay alive. The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.

This research explores how water behaves under the extreme conditions found deep inside ice giant planets like Uranus and Neptune. Researchers used laser-heated diamond anvil cells to squeeze water samples under immense pressures surpassing 200 gigapascals (GPa) alongside temperatures over 2,000 °C. Under these crushing pressures, the oxygen atoms in the water molecule rearrange into a hexagonal close-packed (hcp) lattice rather than the face-centered cubic (fcc) arrangement seen in other high-pressure phases. At these blistering temperatures, the material enters a superionic state. This means the oxygen atoms stay locked in their solid crystal grid, while hydrogen nuclei (protons) melt and flow freely through the lattice like a liquid. The researchers invite further theoretical work to tease apart those properties, especially its mechanical plasticity and electrical conductivity. 

Ice giants like Uranus and Neptune harbor extreme interior environments. Knowing that hcp superionic ice can exist stably at these high temperatures alters models of how heat and electrical charges move inside these planets. The unique flow of protons inside this hot, pressurized ice may help explain the strange, lopsided and multi-poled magnetic fields observed around Uranus and Neptune. Scientists note that more experiments and theoretical simulations are required to fully map out the mechanical plasticity and electrical conductivity of this high-temperature hcp phase. Further experiments will also be needed to pin down exactly where, across the extremes of pressure and temperature, hcp ice is stable relative to its fcc counterpart. As physicists put water to the test with improved experimental techniques and keep finding surprises.

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