Nepal’s disaster looms in Mont Blanc’s icy shadow

Alexander Turnbull, MDT/AP

For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe’s highest peak have gazed upon seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave the colossus its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.

But global warming is dismantling that picture at alarming speed.

Europe’s record heat waves this summer ravaged permafrost that for millennia acted like glue on the Alpine landscape. As high-altitude cold gave way to rising temperatures, cliffs broke apart, sending rock falls cascading from the heights. A notoriously dangerous gully that climbers have long braved on ascents to the 4,805-meter summit became temporarily impassable.

“We weep for our mountain, the way it’s changing. It hits us in the gut,” said Stéphane Bozon, deputy mayor of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, a French town at the foot of the giant straddling the border with Italy.

From mid-July, Bozon said, rock falls increased, while glacial retreat and snowmelt opened crevasses and made some areas difficult to reach or cross.

Each degree of warming can have an outsized impact. On the Aiguille du Midi peak, at an altitude of 3,842 meters, average July temperatures have soared. From 1.6 C in 1994, the monthly average reached a record 3.3 C this July, according to national weather service Meteo France.

“The mountain really dried out, with temperatures unlike any I had ever experienced,” Bozon said.

The warning became still more urgent after the Aug. 26 floods that swept through Nepal and China. They were triggered after a collapse of bedrock and glacier ice sent debris and water surging through several Himalayan rivers. Many scientists initially concluded that climate change played a key role in creating the conditions for the catastrophe.

As Earth’s average temperature rises because of the burning of oil, gas and coal, the likelihood of such disasters increases. In the Alps, glaciers once admired for their icy majesty are increasingly viewed with trepidation as they shrink and lose stability.

Bozon, responsible for safety in Chamonix, says the town urgently needs to prepare for “serious scenarios” involving chunks of glaciers or mountains potentially falling onto inhabited areas.

In Italy’s Lombardy region, Alpine glaciers have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the regional glacier service.

“While it used to snow at high altitudes in the past, now it rains,” said Vanda Bonardo of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps. That shift is affecting the stability of the terrain.

Researcher Ludovic Ravanel expects about 400 major rock collapses in the Mont Blanc massif this year – around 10 times more than two decades ago. The previous disastrous year, 2022, recorded nearly 300.

For mountain guides, those figures represent immediate dangers. Chamonix-based guide Stuart MacDonald canceled plans to lead a group to Mont Blanc’s summit because of melting and falling rocks.

“What’s most scary is that sometimes these rocks are falling on routes that we used to be climbing at this time of year,” he said.

Mont Blanc’s transformation shows that disasters like Nepal’s are not distant warnings. They are signals of a destabilizing climate already reshaping familiar landscapes – and placing communities beneath them in growing danger. [Abridged]