About 17 people remain missing for a day after a huge chunk of an Alpine glacier broke off and crashed into hikers in northern Italy, officials said Monday.
At least six people died and 9 were injured in the avalanche of ice, snow and large rocks that descended the slope of the Marmolada glacier-covered mountain on Sunday afternoon.
Trento prosecutor Sandro Raimondi said 17 tourists were believed to be missing, Italian news agency LaPresse reported.
Veneto regional governor Luca Zaia said some of the hikers in the area on Sunday were tied with ropes as they climbed.
Conditions are too dangerous for rescuers
The nationalities of the known dead have not been released, and conditions were too dangerous Monday morning for dog rescue teams to resume the search for the missing or retrieve the bodies.
The bodies will be brought to an ice rink in the resort town of Canacei in the Dolomites mountain range for identification.
Raimondi was quoted as saying that two of the nine wounded were Germans. Zaya told reporters that one of the Germans was a 65-year-old man. Of the injured patients, one of those in intensive care has not yet been identified.
This view taken Monday shows the glacier that collapsed the day before. (Pierre Teyssot/AFP/Getty Images)
The patients suffered chest and head injuries, Zaia said.
Drones were used to search for missing persons as well as to check safety.
Sixteen cars were left unaccounted for in the area’s parking lot, and authorities tried to trace the occupants through license plates. It was not clear how many of the cars may have belonged to the victims already identified or to the injured, all of whom were airlifted to hospitals on Sunday.
The collapse is estimated at 300 km/h
Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the head of the national civil protection agency were expected to go on Monday to Cannacei, a tourist town in the Dolomites that serves as a base for rescuers.
It was not immediately known what caused the tip of the glacier to break off and hurtle down the slope at a speed estimated by experts at about 300 km/h. But the heat wave that has gripped Italy since May, bringing unusually high temperatures for the start of summer even in the usually cooler Alps, is being cited as a likely factor.
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at the Italian state research center CNR, noted that the long heat wave spanning May and June was the hottest in northern Italy during this period for nearly 20 years.
“This is an absolute anomaly,” Gabrieli said in an interview with Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it would be impossible to predict when or if a serac — a peak on a glacier’s overhang — might break off as it did on Sunday.
Alpine rescuers noted on Sunday that at the end of last week the temperature on the 3,300m high peak exceeded 10C, much higher than usual. Operators of rural shelters on the mountainside said temperatures at the 2,000-meter level had recently reached 24C, unheard of heat for a place where tourists go in the summer to cool off.
The glacier in the Marmolada range is the largest in the Dolomites in northeastern Italy. People ski on it in the winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly in recent decades, with much of its volume gone. Experts from the CNR research center, which has an institute for polar sciences, estimated a few years ago that the glacier would no longer exist within 25 to 30 years.
The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot” likely to suffer heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences.
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