“With global heat, glaciers are thinner and thinner and, when they fall, pieces like skyscrapers come down.” Reinhold Messner, the first mountaineer to have conquered all eight thousand peaks, comments on the tragedy of the Marmolada. “The seracs have always fallen but in the 1960s the danger of this happening was far less. Unfortunately, the mountains are also affected by the pollution of large cities”.
The explorer from Trentino, a pioneer of free climbing, knows Punta di Rocca well. “I’ve climbed it several times, even though I haven’t been there for many years now”, says the 78-year-old from Bressanone (Bolzano) who was the first to climb Everest without oxygen in 1978. “There is hardly any ice there, the serac must not be very big – he observes -. It’s too hot, ten degrees yesterday is an incredible thing, the permafrost goes away and real rivers form under the ice. water that takes everything away “.
Marmolada collapse, Elisa’s cry: “I’m alive thanks to a friend who arrived late, but I saw the others fall”
by Gianfranco Piccoli
A problem, that of global warming and the disappearance of glaciers, which does not only concern our Alps. “Now it happens every day in all glaciers and the danger under the seracs increases”, says Messner, also famous for the crossings of the Antarctica and Greenland, as well as the Gobi Desert, without the support of motor vehicles or sled dogs.
Marmolada, the moment of the collapse of a large block of ice
“I’m not saying that whoever was there today was imprudent – he specifies – Climbing there, along the normal route, is a habit for those who go to the mountains in those parts. A good mountaineer, however, does not go under a saracco in this period: the art of mountaineering – he argues – lies in not dying in an area where this possibility exists and, to succeed, you need to keep your eyes and ears open. Always … “.