Marmolada: the glacier's continuous retreat

The eighth edition of the Participatory Glaciological Campaign on the Marmolada, promoted by the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua, has concluded. It involved collaboration between researchers from the University of Padua, ARPAV, the Fondazione Glaciologica Italiana, students, and volunteer citizens from four different regions. The 2026 campaign made it possible to collect up-to-date data, essential for continuing the monitoring of what remains of the Marmolada glacier, the main glacier of the Dolomiti, and for gaining a better understanding of the impact of climate change at local level. Around thirty people, aged between 16 and 75, took part in the monitoring activities carried out on the glacier.

In the hottest summer at high altitude since 1991, the glacier recorded an average retreat of 23 m at the frontal markers, the loss of 9 hectares, falling to a total of 83 hectares compared with last year’s 92 and now far from the 100 hectares of 2023; on the western front, at one marker, a retreat of 120 metres was recorded over two years. In mid-August, on the Marmolada, surveys showed the crevasses upstream of the 2022 detachment niche filled with meltwater.

“The data collected this year worsen the trend already evident over recent decades, marking a new negative record in the reduction of the glacier’s surface area, which in one year has lost 9 hectares, falling to a total of 83 hectares compared with the 92 of last year, now far from the 100 hectares of 2023,” comments Mauro Varotto, lecturer in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Ancient Sciences and scientific coordinator of the participatory glaciological campaign, reporting the results of the analysis conducted on satellite images by Francesco Ferrarese. “This is a record loss that we had recorded only in 2022, with the tragic collapse of the glacier. If summers like the one just passed are repeated, the glacier may have only about ten years of life left.”

“Taking the month of August as an example, the deviation from the averages was more than 3°C; during the month, on Marmolada (ARPAV Punta Rocca station, 3,250 m) a negative minimum temperature was observed on only 3 days (-0.6°C absolute value), and no day with a negative average temperature was recorded. The glacier’s intense ablation processes therefore continued, and there was no snowfall even at the highest altitudes; likewise, permafrost degradation continued, and at the Piz Boè station there is no frozen ground at any depth,” states Gianni Marigo of ARPAV.”

“The campaign made it possible to observe in high-altitude areas the impacts of climate change on the ski industry: the widening of ski runs and the new infrastructure and pipelines for the production of artificial snow up to the glacier fronts show that capital investors (public or private) do not want to escape the ‘ski trap’,” says Alberto Lanzavecchia of the University of Padua, emphasising the importance of the cultural and educational dimension. “This strategic short-sightedness has a heavy impact on the mountain landscape: an ‘altar’ to the practice of skiing while everything around the glacier is sacrificed to elitist recreation and to our unlimited extractivist and wasteful development model.”

“Marmolada is one of the more than 150 glaciers that every year the Fondazione Glaciologica Italiana (formerly Comitato Glaciologico Italiano) keeps under observation from the western Alps to Gran Sasso thanks to a network of volunteer operators continuing a tradition that began in 1911,” concludes the person responsible for Triveneto, Aldino Bondesan. “2026 is also proving to be a record year at Alpine scale, with losses in glacier thickness in this sector three times higher than the average of the last decade and with winter snow exhausted as early as the end of July, weeks earlier than usual. In mid-August, on Marmolada, surveys showed the crevasses upstream of the 2022 detachment niche filled with meltwater, the same condition that our studies had identified as the cause of the collapse. The participatory campaign shows that observing together with citizens is the best way to keep attention alive on what is happening at high altitudes.”

The 2026 campaign therefore closes with far from reassuring prospects for the future, inviting us to consider the urgency of a change of direction. Marmolada is not only an inert mass of ice, but a sentinel and an extremely sensitive thermometer of an illness that begins far away and has political, economic and cultural implications involving us all.