Nepal’s flood disaster and the impact of climate change loom large in the icy shadow of Mont Blanc

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France (AP) — For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities have watched over Mont Blanc, Europe's tallest peak, with awe. Its snow-capped summit has always been a symbol of stability, but climate change is threatening to dismantle the picture at an alarming pace.

This summer's record heat waves ravaged permafrost, the icy glue holding the Alpine landscape together. Defrosting cliffs became unstable, causing rock falls to cascade from the heights. A notoriously dangerous gully, treacherous for climbers ascending to the summit's 4,805-meter (15,766-foot) peak, became temporarily impassable.

Stéphane Bozon, deputy mayor of Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, expressed deep concern over the changing mountain. "From mid-July onward, we saw an increase in rock falls. We saw areas becoming difficult to access because of glacial retreat and snowmelt, with crevasses opening up and rock collapses making some areas difficult to reach or traverse," he said to the Associated Press.

Each degree of warming holds significant consequence. In the Mont Blanc range, temperatures for July soared from a chilly 1.6 C (33.8 F) in 1994 to a scorching 3.3 C (37.4 F) in this July, according to Meteo France, the national weather service. Bozon noted, "The mountain really dried out, with temperatures unlike any I had ever experienced."

The Himalayan flood disaster, which struck Nepal and China in August, serves as a stark reminder of the risks and uncertainties posed by climate change. Scientists attribute the initial collapse of bedrock and glacier ice to climate change, as Earth's global average temperature rises due to the burning of fossil fuels.

In the Alps, shrinking glaciers are causing alarm as they lose stability. Bozon, responsible for safety in Chamonix, warns that the town needs to prepare for "serious scenarios" of chunks of glacier or mountain potentially falling onto inhabited areas. "We have to move quite quickly because this summer has shaken us, and year after year we're being shaken by the glaciers' retreat," he said.

Similarly, researchers in Italy have documented dramatic damage caused by heat on glaciers this year. Alpine glaciers in Lombardy have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the region's glacier service. Vanda Bonardo, head of the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, observed that rain now falls at high altitudes, where snow used to melt. "So we’ve also seen the effects on the stability of the terrain," she said.

Rapidly melting permafrost has weakened the grip of steep rock faces on Alpine peaks. It has taken a beating from the succession of heat waves. Bozon's colleague, Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University, expects this year's tally of rock falls in the Mont Blanc massif to reach around 400, about 10 times more than two decades ago. He believes that many of the once-stable rock faces are on the verge of becoming unstable and remaining so only due to the presence of ice.