World News for Students of English

08-07-2022 07:00

In the northern Italian Alps, at least nine people died after a glacier collapsed on Sunday.

The slide sent ice, snow, and rock onto a popular trail on the Marmolada Mountain, and the avalanche killed at least seven people, including three Italians and two Czechs. Emergency officials said that the collapse injured several people; however, they didn’t know the number of mountaineers involved in the accident, and rescue efforts were still underway.

The cause of the glacier’s collapse wasn’t immediately clear. Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi said that the incident was without doubt linked to climate change.

In recent years, the area has been experiencing unusually high temperatures. The climate of the Alps is changing rapidly, and scientists say that the glaciers have lost half their ice mass since 1850. Since the late 1800s, loss rates increased, and glaciers are now more unstable.

Difficult words: avalanche (a mass of snow, ice, and rocks that fall from a mountain), mountaineer (a person who climbs mountains), rapidly (very quickly).

You can watch the video news lower on this page.