Italy and Switzerland to redraw Alpine border due to melting glaciers

The melting, which has been attributed to climate change, revealed new topographical details which raised new questions about the dimensions of the border between the two countries. In 2022, the jurisdiction of a glacial Italian mountain lodge there came under question when melting ice revealed the refuge was actually straddling the border.

“Significant sections of the border are defined by the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow,” the Swiss government said in a statement obtained by Bloomberg. “These formations are changing due to the melting of glaciers.”

The change will become official when both countries agree to the update. Switzerland approved the change on Friday, and said Italy was poised to do the same, according to the BBC.

While most people think of glacial loss as a dramatic degradation of the length of a glacier’s ice, thinning occurs when a glacier melts from the top, said Mark Carey, a professor at the University of Oregon who oversees the school’s Glacier Lab. This alters the ridge line topography, and in some cases, international borders, he added.

Experts expect ice across the globe, including glaciers in the Alps, to continue shrinking as the climate warms.

Switzerland’s glaciers lost 10 percent of their total volume between 2022 and 2023, according to the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Scientists found that winters with low snowfall combined with increasingly hot summers were to blame for the losses.

Swiss researchers have tallied more than 1,000 small glaciers lost to a warming climate. Some countries have already lost all of their glaciers: Venezuela lost its last glacier earlier this year. New Zealand has lost at least 264 glaciers, and the western United States has lost about 400 glaciers since the middle of the 20th century. East Africa has less than 2 square kilometers of total glacial ice remaining.