When the Swiss and Italian governments got together to redraw the alpine border that divides the two countries last year, due to rapidly retreating glaciers, it put into stark focus a challenge that is expected to face many nations that have natural structures that mark territories.
Fortunately, it's been a collaborative process, which experts believe is partly due to the land in question not being privately owned, and that the national border sits atop a mountain peak that has, in recent years, seen Switzerland's dividing line shift over into Italian territory.
After the redraw in May 2023, it still took nearly 18 months for the Swiss government to approve the change, and Italy is yet to sign off on the revised border map. The changes will concern the border in the Plateau Rosa, Rifugio Carrel and Gobba di Rollin regions, which are near the Matterhorn peak – one of the more famous Alps landmarks and whose crossing connects ski resort Zermatt (Switzerland) to the town Breuil-Cervinia (Italy).
"With the melting of the glaciers, these natural elements evolve and redefine the national border," the Swiss government said in a statement in late September following their agreement on map changes.
Regardless of views on climate change and global warming, the world's glaciers are increasingly retreating despite seasonal fluctuations and independent of natural glacial movement caused by factors like internal deformation. Much like the Siberian craters that are now the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, there's an intense focus on what changing mountainous landscapes mean for populations – especially ones that straddle two or more nations.
A Swiss Academy of Sciences report published in October found that in 2024, despite "exceptionally large volumes of snow during the winter" – some 30% more than average – a huge dust dump that drifted in from the Sahara accelerated snow melt and resulted in a 2.5% loss of glacial volume.
"The retreat of the glacier tongues and their disintegration continue unabated as a result of climate change," the report stated. "The previous years of 2022 and 2023 saw a total of 10% of Swiss glacier volume disappearing, more than had ever been recorded before. The loss of around 2.5% recorded this year is also higher than the mean value of the last decade."
That 10% loss, excluding the present year's measures, was more in 24 months than over the entire period from 1960 to 1990. In a 2023 study, scientists modeled that the 'modest' 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) increase in global temperatures, which is the baseline from the Paris Agreement that we're most likely to surpass, would result in more than a quarter of the Earth's present glacial cover disappearing by 2100.
The Switzerland-Italy scenario won't be an isolated example of shifting borders as the natural environment changes. Sálajiegna, a glacier that sits on the border between Norway and Sweden, has two ice 'tongues,' one that stretches into Norway and the other into Sweden. Over the last few decades, the glacier has receded at around 20 m (66 ft) per year; in 2013, the changes have also resulted in changes to water access on either side of the border.
There are also glacial borders between Switzerland and Austria, Chile and Argentina in Patagonia, including the famous Southern Patagonian Ice Field, and one of key geopolitical interest – the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas in Central Asia, where Pakistan, India and China meet.
Unlike Switzerland and Italy, which are part of the Schengen Area, allowing free travel between countries, the Siachen Glacier, with areas of it peaking at 6,000 m (20,000 ft), is known as the world's highest battleground. It marks the northern point of the Line of Control (LoC), which split Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani-controlled zones. The LoC has been an area of simmering tension and fighting, and the border along the glacier has never been clearly defined. What's more, widespread kerosene use for fuel at army posts has seen reports leak of accelerated melting – and trash accumulation – at these spots along the glacier.
However, two countries have worked out novel ways of managing shifting borders between neighbors. In 2014, researchers began work on the Italian Limes project, which saw GPS sensors set out along a stretch of the Italy and Austria border in the Ötztal Alps. The movement tracking system was improved on two years later, with a grid of 26 sensors that fed GPS data to a cartographic pantograph in order to plot the 'moving border' between the two countries. They'd originally come to an agreement in 2006 to work together on a more fluid approach to that dividing line.
There are other concerns besides ceding territory for countries with glacial borders. In Italy and Switzerland, the popular mountain areas along the border, which are a hub for tourists, are becoming more prone to rock falls and landslides, which lines up with a study in Nature that found an increased prevalence and severity of landslides in regions of glacial loss in the high mountains of Asia (HMA). This has the potential for a hazard triggered on one side of the border to greatly impact those on the other.
"Retreat of glaciers in the HMA of 20 years appears to be associated with more frequent landslides, and larger landslides," the researchers found. "Along with climate change, glacial melting has been identified as one of the main triggers of landslide activity in high mountain areas (HMA)."
As Swiss professor Adrian Brugger told Columbia Climate School's State of the Planet recently, glacial loss in these alpine regions makes life near the mountains much riskier – for both sides.
“There’s a fear of displacement in areas that have been settled with houses that are 500 years old," said Brügger. "People just live with a 'go' bag beside their bed."
Source: Columbia Climate School