August 2026 was the world’s joint hottest month ever recorded, pushing global temperatures back above 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. In Italy, glaciologists say that heat is accelerating the retreat of Alpine glaciers, with one Lombardy glacier losing 31 metres this year and some monitoring delayed because the melt season hasn’t yet ended.
Listen to Australian and world news and follow trending topics with SBS News Podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
In Italy's Lombardy Alps, the effects of climate change are stark.
The Dosdè Glacier is shrinking, and fast.
The surface has no residual snow from the previous winter, and it's left the ice exposed through the final weeks of the melt season.
For a glacier, snow left over from the previous winter is the material that can build future ice.
Andrea Toffaletti, vice president of the Lombardy Glaciology Service, says without that snow, the glacier loses the layer that should protect and replenish it after winter.
“Compared to past years we can confirm a strong decrease in the glacier there is no snow that has remained from the year on the whole of the glacier, this means the glacier is negatively impacted. It also means that the glacier will not have the source, it will not have that part of the snow that should form during the winter but that now we find totally depleted.”
Mr Toffaletti has been measuring glaciers for years.
On 5th September, he travelled to the Dosdè Glacier in the Italian Alps and found it had receded by 31 metres this year.
His team of researchers is still gathering and analysing the data, but he says it could be the worst year they’ve measured since 2022.
"In terms of climate, we can certainly say that this was one of the hottest summers not only from the 1950s to today, but also probably also more than previous years, since the instrumental measurements were carried out. We have detected a difference of about three degrees and more than three degrees above the average of the last 150 years."
Copernicus, the Earth observation component of the European Union's Space programme, says August 2026 was the hottest August it has ever recorded.
Western Europe had its warmest summer on record, surpassing 2003, after early, persistent and intense heatwaves that began in May.
Record sea surface temperatures were recorded around Europe along the Atlantic coast and in the western Mediterranean, linked to strong or severe marine heatwave conditions.
An organisation called the Glaciers Caravan has been collating information from different glaciers around the Alps.
Spokesman Walter Maggi says they found fundamental changes.
“The Forni Glacier is one of the largest glaciers in Italy, but if we go to see it today, which is what we did with the Glaciers Caravan, we’re going to see a glacier that has retreated significantly. Until a few years ago, it was a single glacier, with three streams that merged. But what we see today are three completely separate glaciers because it has retreated to higher elevations, so the individual parts, the individual catchment basins, have become separated. So today we’re observing this particularly critical situation, which is, however, typical of many other glaciers we see in the Alps.”
Another example comes from the Miage Glacier in France.
Vanda Bonardo is the president of CIPRA, an International Commission set up to protect the Alps.
She says even there, the recent retreat has accelerated sharply.
"The Miage Glacier is a glacier that is less affected by climate change precisely because it is covered in debris. We visited it in 2020 and then returned in 2026, but in the meantime it had receded by 15 meters, equivalent to a 5-storey building. This glacier had also receded in the recent past. For example, from 1980 to 2020 it receded by 15 meters, meaning it lost 15 meters over 40 years. Then from 2020 onward, in just six years, it lost another 15 meters and what does this tell us? It tells us that there is an incredible acceleration in these phenomena, which in this case is evident through the reduction in the thickness of the glacier.
The next set of observation is expected in October, when researchers hope to know how much ice was lost during Italy’s hottest summer since 1950.
This content was created by SBS News journalists. Some voiceovers of translated interviews in this podcast series were assisted by AI.
