The Mountains Are Giving Back Their Deadly Secrets
Imagine lacing up your hiking boots on a crisp autumn morning, the jagged peaks of the Dolomites glowing pink against a brilliant blue sky. You have planned your trek for weeks, looking forward to the thin air, the silence, and the sweeping views of glaciers that still cling to the highest valleys. But as you pause to catch your breath, something glints in the melting snow. It is not a piece of quartz or an old tin can. It is a rusted, centuries-old artillery shell, half-buried in the ice, its shape unmistakably lethal. This is no longer a hypothetical scenario, but a reality that has become increasingly common in the Italian Alps. Melting glaciers, driven by the accelerating pace of climate change, are uncovering a grim treasure trove from the First World War: hundreds of unexploded bombs, hand grenades, and other munitions. In September alone, more than two hundred of these dangerous relics were found scattered across the high-altitude terrain of the Dolomites, prompting the Italian army to send specialized troops from the Julia Alpine Brigade to carefully clear the area. As the officials themselves put it, “As the ice retreats, history resurfaces—and with it, dangers from the past. More than a century later, the mountains continue to yield unexploded ordnance from the Great War.”
To understand why so much weaponry is hidden in these glaciers, one has to look back more than a hundred years to one of the most brutal and forgotten fronts of the First World War: the so-called “White War.” Between 1915 and 1918, Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces fought not in muddy trenches, but in the freezing, rugged mountain terrain of the Dolomites, a battlefield unlike any other. Soldiers were stationed at altitudes where the air was thin, temperatures dropped to deadly extremes, and the landscape itself was an enemy more dangerous than any rifle fire. They carved entire fortresses and living quarters into the ice and rock, stringing telephone lines, supply cables, and rope ladders across sheer cliff faces. They endured avalanches that could sweep entire battalions away, frostbite that crippled feet and hands, and the constant psychological strain of knowing that a single misstep could mean a fall into a crevasse. Yet, despite these horrific conditions, the armies continued to hurl artillery shells and hand grenades at each other, fighting for peaks that often had little strategic value beyond prestige and morale. When the fighting ended, much of this weaponry was left behind, buried under snow and ice, never to be seen again—until now. As the glaciers that once covered these battlefields retreat further each summer, they expose the frozen remnants of a war that was fought in some of the most inhospitable conditions ever known to mankind.
The recent finds are not just a small scatter of rusty metal. They include artillery shells, hand grenades, and a variety of other weapons used by both the Italian and Austrian armies during that deadly conflict. Hikers reported several sightings of these unexploded bombs over the summer, with the main cluster appearing around Canal San Bovo in the Primiero Valley, in the eastern Trentino region. The reports were serious enough to mobilise the Italian army, which dispatched teams of highly trained sappers and mountain troops to conduct systematic searches across several high-altitude areas of Trentino-Alto Adige. Their efforts have focused on the Carè Alto and Vedretta di Lares areas of the Adamello-Brenta region in Trento, as well as the Val Martello and Stelvio area in Bolzano. Even the lonely edges of the Livrio glacier and the slopes of Cima Tre Cannoni have yielded their hidden share of historical violence. These are not simple operations conducted on flat, accessible ground. The work takes place amidst melting glaciers, on steep slopes and precarious high-altitude terrain, where a single mistake could be fatal. As army officials explained, “These complex operations—carried out amidst melting glaciers, steep slopes, and high-altitude terrain—demand a high level of technical expertise and experience.”
The soldiers tasked with this dangerous mission are not just disarmament specialists; they are also historians, archaeologists, and guardians of public safety. The Julia Alpine Brigade is a storied unit of the Italian army, deeply rooted in the mountain regions it serves. Its soldiers are trained to move, survive, and operate in conditions that would incapacitate lesser-trained troops. For them, uncovering a World War One grenade is not a cinematic moment—it is a delicate, methodical process. The rusted shells are often unstable, their fuses corroded but still potentially deadly after more than a century. Transporting them out of the mountains requires extreme care, and detonation is often the only safe disposal method. But beyond the technical challenge, there is a deeper purpose to this work. The army is not just clearing bombs for the sake of clearing them; they are making the mountains safer for everyone who comes after. Every year, thousands of mountaineers, hikers, and tourists venture into these valleys and peaks, following well-trodden trails that are now beginning to intersect with the remnants of a century-old war. As the ice continues to retreat, many of these objects become visible and accessible, and the risk they pose is not always immediate or obvious. The army warned that the dangers tend to increase with altitude, meaning that the higher a hiker climbs, the more likely they are to encounter these hidden hazards. “Clearing these areas,” the officials noted, “means eliminating hidden dangers and making the trails—frequented every year by mountaineers, hikers, and tourists—safer.”
The connection between climate change and these discoveries is impossible to ignore. It is not a coincidence that the explosives are emerging now, more than a century after the war ended. The glaciers of the Dolomites are retreating at an alarming rate, the result of rising global temperatures and changing weather patterns. What was once permanent ice is now becoming slush, rock, and exposed earth. This process is unlocking a dangerous legacy that has lain untouched for decades. It is expected that as climate change further melts the Dolomites glaciers, more of the White War’s deadly remnants will emerge. This is not merely a historical curiosity; it is a direct, tangible consequence of the warming planet, one that puts modern civilians in contact with the violence of the past. There is an almost poetic, tragic irony in this. The same forces that make the mountains so beautiful—the ice, the snow, the isolation—are the forces that preserved these weapons, and the same forces that now threaten them are exposing what was hidden. The mountains are, in a way, keeping a record, and they are now releasing their archive in pieces. But these pieces come with a warning: this is not history confined to museums and textbooks, but history that can still harm, maim, or kill.
As the Italian army continues its slow, painstaking work, the rest of us are left to reflect on what this means. The White War is often overshadowed by the more familiar battles of the Western Front, but here in the jagged peaks of the Dolomites, its scars never fully disappeared. The soldiers who fought there endured unimaginable hardship, and their physical remains—not just their weapons, but sometimes the soldiers themselves—are being returned to the surface. For families whose ancestors fought in these mountains, these discoveries can be deeply emotional. For the local communities, they are both a reminder of tragedy and a practical concern that requires constant vigilance. But perhaps most importantly, the emergence of these unexploded bombs serves as a stark warning about the fragility of our current climate. We are not just losing ice; we are losing the protective layer that kept the past safely frozen. With each passing year, as the glaciers shrink and the temperatures rise, new objects will appear. The army, the local authorities, and the hikers who venture into these high places will all have to learn to live with a mountain landscape that is both beautiful and dangerous, storied and unpredictable. The next time you hear about melting glaciers, remember that it is not just about rising sea levels or vanishing landscapes—it is also about the hidden remnants of human conflict, resurfacing to remind us that the past is never truly gone. And for the soldiers of the Julia Alpine Brigade, the work is far from over. As long as the ice keeps melting, they will keep climbing, keeps searching, and keep clearing away the deadly relics of a war that ended a lifetime ago, but refuses to stay buried.
