eyed with trepidation<\/a> as they shrink and lose stability.<\/p>\nBozon, who is in charge of safety for Chamonix, says his town urgently needs to prepare for \u201cserious scenarios\u201d of chunks of glacier or mountain potentially falling onto inhabited areas. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to move quite quickly because this summer has shaken us and year after year we\u2019re being shaken by the glaciers\u2019 retreat,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In Italy, researchers are also documenting dramatic damage wrought by heat on glaciers this year. In Lombardy, Alpine glaciers have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the region’s glacier service.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile it used to snow at high altitudes in the past, now it rains,\u201d said Vanda Bonardo, head of the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, a nongovernmental organization.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ve also seen the effects on the stability of the terrain,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Rock falls in the Mont Blanc area have surged <\/p>\n
Permafrost that has held Alpine peaks in its icy grip for thousands of years acts as a cement, helping to hold their steep rock faces together. It took a beating from the succession of heat waves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn’t mean that all the rock faces will collapse in the coming years or decades but quite a number of them are on the verge of becoming unstable and remain stable today only because of the presence of that ice. As the ice changes, we have seen a huge, huge number of rock falls and rock collapses this year,\u201d said Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University who specializes in climate change’s impact on mountain snows, glaciers and frosts.<\/p>\n
A collapse is a major fall involving more than 100 cubic meters (3,531 cubic feet) of rock \u2014 more than enough to fill a large shipping container. Ravanel expects this year’s tally of collapses in the Mont Blanc massif \u201cwill probably reach around 400.\u201d He says that is about 10 times more than two decades ago.<\/p>\n
The last time things got close to this bad was the \u2019\u2019catastrophic year\u2033 of 2022, he said, with nearly 300 collapses. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis has really been one of the defining features of the summer of 2026,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A Mont Blanc climbing guide juggles the risks<\/p>\n
Chamonix-based mountain guide Stuart MacDonald says it shocks him to see how rapidly and extensively glaciers that hang from the flanks of the Mont Blanc massif are retreating.<\/p>\n
When he guides people up the peaks, he points them to \u201cwhere the glacier was last year and this is where it was 10 years ago. And that usually has quite an effect.\u201d <\/p>\n
Melting and the risk of rock falls made his job \u201cpretty challenging\u201d this summer and forced him to cancel plans to lead a group to Mont Blanc’s summit last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou hear it before you see it and then you\u2019ll turn round and you\u2019ll just see an enormous cascade of rocks coming down a slope and it can be quite terrifying,\u201d MacDonald said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s most scary is that sometimes these rocks are falling on routes that we used to be climbing at this time of year,\u201d he added. \u201cIt can be depressing sometimes when you look at something that you maybe climbed in July or August in the past and you see that it\u2019s absolutely impossible to do it now.\u201d <\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Leicester reported from Paris. Associated Press journalists Trisha Thomas and Paolo Santalucia in Rome and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHAMONIX-MONT-BLANC, France (AP) \u2014 For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe’s highest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16970,824,46501,3178,5,46504,83,46502,1600,27430,46503,148,90],"class_list":["post-76395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-climate-and-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-earth-science","tag-floods","tag-france","tag-france-nepal-mont-blanc-alps-climate-change","tag-general-news","tag-glaciers","tag-i","tag-natural-disasters","tag-nepal-tibet-floods","tag-weather","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}