Glacier Tragedy Shows Reach of Europe’s New Heat

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/world/europe/italy-glacier-collapse.html

By Jason Horowitz, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: CANAZEI, Italy — Days before a glacier in the Italian Dolomites broke off with the force of a collapsing skyscraper, crushing at least nine hikers under an avalanche of ice, snow and rock, Carlo Budel heard water running under the ice. ...A year after Greece lost lives, livestock and entire swaths of forest to wildfires, and deadly floods swept through Germany, the calamity in these mountains this week provided the latest evidence that almost no part of the continent can escape the effects of Europe’s new, intense and often unlivable summer heat. That includes the highest peak of the Dolomites. Italy is suffering through another prolonged and scorching heat wave, which contributed to the disaster and has brought the worst drought in 70 years along the Po River, its longest waterway, cutting off fountains and parching parts of the country. ...In the last 20 years, Professor Fazzini said, Italy had lost 25 percent of the water from those shrinking glaciers.… 

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