Every summer, a team in northern Italy uses tractors to unravel massive tarps over the snowy Presena glacier to protect it from melting away. Global Warming has caused the Presena glacier to lose more than one-third of its volume since 1993.
When the ski season is over, cable cars are disembarked, and the team gets to work laying out the white tarps on the border between the Lombardy and Trentino Alto Adige regions. “This area is continuously shrinking, so we cover as much of it as possible,” said Davide Panizza, head of the Carosello-Tonale company that does the work.
Panizza and his team first launched the project in 2008, covering around 30,000 sq meters; today, they cover 100,000 sq meters at an altitude of 2700-3000m. The coverings are long strips of high-quality geotextile tarpaulins that block the sunlight, keeping the snow at a lower temperature than the air outside. The idea is to preserve as much snow as possible. Each strip measures 70m by 5m.
Once the team has laid out the tarps, they sow them together to ensure warm air doesn’t slip inside. Then, bags of sand anchor the tarp down, protecting it from blowing away in the wind. After it’s complete, the sheets are hardly distinguishable from the white alpine snow beneath.
Panizza’s team isn’t the first to cover mass areas of snow to protect it from climate change. “There are glacier cover systems similar to ours on a few Austrian glaciers, but the surface covered by the tarpaulins is much smaller,” Panizza added.
Franco Del Pero, who leads the operation, said:
When we remove them in September, and we see that they did their job, we feel proud.
The Austrian-made tarps are not cheap. They cost up to $450 (€400) each, and it takes a lot of them to cover a significant area of land. It takes six weeks for the team to apply the tarps and another six weeks to remove them before ski season sets in again.
