Italian officials sounded an alarm Wednesday over climate change due to the threat that a fast-moving melting glacier is posing to a picturesque valley near the Alpine town of Courmayeur.

Courmayeur mayor Stefano Miserocchi closed down a mountain road and banned access to part of the Val Ferret, a popular hiking area outside of town on the southern side of the Mont Blanc massif. Those moves came after experts warned that a 250,000-cubic-meter mass of the Planpincieux glacier was at risk of collapsing.

The glacier, which spreads 1,327 square kilometers (512 square miles) across the mountain, has been moving up to 50 centimeters (nearly 20 inches) a day.

"There are no models to tell us if it will fall entirely or in pieces," the mayor told Sky TG24. "We need to keep an eye on the monitoring."

He emphasized that even if a large chunk of the glacier collapses, no residents would be at risk, just the area of road that has been closed.

The glacier is located in the Alps on the Grande Jorasses peak of the Mont Blanc massif, which straddles the borders of Italy, France and Switzerland and contains the highest peak in Western Europe. Officials said unusually high temperatures during August and September had accelerated ice melt at the Planpincieux, which has been monitored by the Safe Mountain Foundation since 2013.

Environment Minister Sergio Costa said the emergency shows "the necessity and urgency of strong and coordinated action for the climate, to prevent extreme events that risk dramatic consequences."

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte alerted world leaders to the danger in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, telling them the glacier's potential collapse "is an alarm that we cannot be indifferent to."

A new special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Wednesday that glaciers around the world, outside of Greenland and Antarctica but including Europe, are losing 220 billion metric tons of ice a year. The report said glacier melt is happening faster than before and is accelerating.

The report projects that if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, these glaciers in general will shrink 36 percent between now and the end of the century. But smaller glaciers, like those in the Alps, could lose up to 80 percent of their ice by the year 2100 in a worst-case scenario.

(Cover image via VCG.)

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