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Italy Resort Lifts Alert on Melting Glacier Threat

The Italian Alpine resort on Sunday lifted a state of warning last week because of concerns that a fragment of ice in the Mont Blanc mountain range could fall on them.

Approximately 15 residents who have been displaced will now return to their homes in Courmayeur and traffic in the Cap Ferret Valley is allowed again, reports AFP quoting city officials said.

Climate change has rapidly eroded the world's ice, producing a fresh risk for the town of Courmayeur, a tourist city in the Aosta Valley area of Italy, along the French frontier.

The town was warned on Wednesday when a block of ice measured at around 500,000 cubic meters — the size of the Milan Cathedral, one official said — from the Planpincieux glacier risked collapsing and destroying houses.

But on Sunday, city authorities declared that all protective controls have been removed.

Some locals were dismissive of the closure and said it further hit a tourism season already affected by the coronavirus measures.

But the mayor’s office said again on Sunday: “The evacuation was necessary and inevitable because of the glacier risk.”

While regretting the alarmist sound of some news coverage, officials maintained that the danger to the city was genuine.

On a recent helicopter ride by, an AFP writer saw a gaping chasm on the lower section of the Planpincieux, through which two waterfalls poured into the valley as it fell from the mountainside like a giant sheet of gray polystyrene.

The Planpincieux glacier even suffered a partial failure in September and October last year, during which new monitoring steps were placed in effect.

Last year's research by Swiss scientists showed that Alpine glaciers could decline between 65 and 90 percent this century, depending on how quickly the planet would mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

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