Home » Melting glaciers force Italy and Switzerland to redraw border in the Alps

Melting glaciers force Italy and Switzerland to redraw border in the Alps

Melting glaciers force Italy and Switzerland to redraw border in the Alps

Swisstopo, Switzerland’s national mapping agency, says that the country’s borders with Italy, France, Austria, Germany and Liechtenstein have to be amended fairly frequently.

The changes are normally based on readings taken by surveyors, without politicians getting involved.

Across the Alps, glaciers are melting at alarming rates. In the summer of 2022, 11 hikers were killed in the Italian Dolomites when a large chunk of rock and ice broke off from the Marmolada glacier, the biggest in the Dolomites.

Scientists said recently that the glacier is now in an “irreversible coma” and predicted that it could disappear completely by 2040.

Temperatures across the Alps are rising at about 0.3C per decade — around twice as fast as the global average.

Unless greenhouse gas emissions can be dramatically curbed, glaciers in the Alps are expected to shrink by up to 90 per cent by the end of the century, scientists say.