No explanation for 17 people after a hiker hit by an Italian glacier avalanche

ROME — About 17 people Not even a day after a huge chunk. Alpine glaciers collapsed in northern Italy and crashed into hikers, officials said Monday.

On Sunday afternoon, an avalanche struck a mountain slope at the top of the Marmolada Glacier, injuring nine people, killing at least six and injuring nine.

Trent's prosecutor Sandro Raimondi is believed to be missing 17 hikers, the Italian news agency LaPresse reported.

Governor Luca Zaia of Veneto said that some of the people hiking in the area on Sunday were roped together as they climbed.

The nationality of the known dead has not been revealed, and the situation is that rescue teams with dogs can resume searching for the missing person or kill the body on Monday morning. It was too dangerous.

The bodies are taken to the ice skating rink in the Dolomites resort town of Kanazei for identification.

Raimondi reportedly stated that two of the nine injured were German. Zaia told reporters that one of the Germans was a 65-year-old man. One of the injured patients in the intensive care unit has not yet been identified.

The patient suffered chest and skull injuries, Zia said.

Drones were used to look for what was missing and to ensure safety.

16 cars remained unclaimed in the parking lot in the area, and authorities attempted to track residents through license plates. The number of cars that may have been owned by the victims or injured already identified was unknown, all of which were taken to the hospital by helicopter on Sunday.

Rescue teams have been melting downhill from glaciers for decades, and the downhill conditions were still too unstable at the beginning of Monday, sending back teams of people and dogs to produce large amounts of debris. He said he couldn't dig deeper.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the head of the National Civil Protection Agency were traveling to the disaster area for a briefing on Monday.

It was not immediately clear why the glacier's apex collapsed and thundered the slopes at a speed estimated by experts at 300 km / h. However, the heat waves that hit Italy since May have been cited as a likely factor that caused unusually high temperatures in the early summer, even in the normally cool Alps.

Jacopo Gabrielli, a polar science researcher at Italy's National CNR Research Center, said the long heat wave from May to June was the hottest in northern Italy for almost 20 years. I did.

"It's absolutely unusual," Gabrielli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it was impossible to predict when or when shellac (the apex from the glacier overhang) would break, as it did on Sunday.

Sunday's alpine rescue team saw temperatures at 3,300 meters (11,000 feet) high peaks exceed 10 ° C (50F), much higher than normal, at the end of last week. Pointed out. The operator of a rustic shelter along the hillside said temperatures at the level of 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) have recently reached 24 ° C (75 ° F).

The glaciers of the Marmolada Mountains are the largest in the Dolomites Mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski with it in winter. However, glaciers have melted rapidly over the last few decades, much of which has disappeared. Experts at the Italian National CNR Research Center, where the Institute for Polar Sciences is located, estimated a few years ago that glaciers would disappear within 25-30 years.

The Mediterranean coastal region, including Southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot” that is likely to be affected by heat waves and water scarcity.