While the Deux Alpes glacier has opened its doors and is getting ready for a long summer of skiing and snowboarding, the Presena glacier is going into hibernation under a blanket of geotextile sheets.
For those who don’t know, the Presena glacier is one of the few skiable glaciers left in Italy. With an altitude ranging from 2,700 m to 3,000 m, it is a destination for winter skiing as well as spring and summer skiing; thanks to its high altitude and its favourable exposure to snow-bearing weather fronts, this glacier receives a great deal of snow all year round, which makes Adamello Ski one of the ski areas with the highest number of skiable days (from October to almost the end of June).
But while there is never a shortage of snow in winter, in summer the glacier suffers from high temperatures that threaten its very existence, made even worse by global warming, which is making itself felt more and more every year.
To prevent the death of this much-loved glacier, the Adamello Ski tourism consortium, in collaboration with the University of Trento, has adopted a solution that was introduced in Austria a few years ago: covering the glaciers with a white “blanket”.
With the help of special geotextile sheets, the sun’s rays are reflected by the white colour and so do not strike the snow; the sheets also protect the ice from the warm summer rains which, together with the sun, are what causes the perennial snow to melt.
“This expedient” was put into practice in 2008 and has been repeated every summer since. So far the results have been astonishing: over these years several metres of snow have been saved every year (from 2 to 1.5 metres a year), a truly remarkable thickness.
The excellent result meant that the project has been run again year after year, right up to today in 2012, with a further new development: this year the Presena glacier will be covered with 100,000 square metres of sheets, the equivalent of around 14 football pitches.
This is how the ski area announced the start of the covering work for summer 2012:
The operations to cover the glacier began last week and had to contend with some very strange weather, which between Monday and Tuesday brought around 30 cm of fresh snow at altitude. In recent days, helped by the fine weather, work has resumed at full speed and will continue for the whole week. Covering the glacier is part of a project that also involves the Autonomous Province of Trento, which funds one third of the purchase of the sheets and of the snowmaking (the other 2/3 are paid for by the Carosello company), and the University of Trento, which monitors and studies the effects of the sheets.
The geotextile sheet technique, imported from Austria, was adopted on the Presena in 2001. “Back then, however, the sheets were welded with a different technique and only covered the part of the glacier that runs under the two drag lifts – explains Giacinto Delpero, president of the Carosello company – It was in 2008 that we started using geotextile sheets, which are laid out with the help of snow groomers and heat-welded”. This summer a very large area of the glacier will be covered, 100,000 square metres, including the skiable part and the part that supports the lifts, which is particularly sensitive because the iron pylons can overheat and cause the snow to melt quickly. As always, the sheets will be removed in September, before the start of the new winter season.
We wish the glacier a “mild” summer, perhaps with the odd out-of-season snowfall :)
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