Rescue teams have flown drones over an Alpine mountainside in Italy in an attempt to find any more victims from the collapse of a glacier that sent an avalanche of ice, snow and rocks into hikers on Sunday.
At least six people were killed and an indeterminate number is missing after a huge chunk of the melting glacier on the Marmolada peak broke off. Rescuers said nine injured survivors had been found.
Attention is focused on determining how many people are unaccounted for on the Marmolada peak. Sixteen cars remained unclaimed in the area s parking lot.
The authorities have been trying to track down occupants through vehicle licence plates. It was not known how many of the cars could have been owned by the already identified victims or injured, all of whom were flown by helicopters to hospitals in north-eastern Italy on Sunday.
After the search was stopped temporarily on Sunday night, officials said about 15 people could be missing, but stressed that the situation was changing. Rescuers said conditions downslope from the glacier were too unstable to send teams of people and dogs to dig into tons of debris.
It is an unimaginable carnage, a source told Rai News. DNA testing will only identify some bodies. Two of the victims have been identified as German, according to Italian news reports.
The Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, and the head of the national civil protection agency were expected to go on Monday to Canazei, a tourist town in the Dolomite range that has been serving as a base for rescuers.
Relatives were expected to go to the town to identify their loved ones when rescuers can safely remove them from the mountain.
What caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts as 300 kph or more than 200 mph was not immediately known. The heatwave gripping Italy since May, which has brought temperatures unusually high for the start of summer, even in the normally cooler Alps, was cited as a likely factor.
Jacopo Gabrieli, a researcher at Italy's state-owned CNR research centre, noted that the long heatwave, spanning May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy for nearly 20 years.
Gabrieli said in an interview on Italian state TV that it is absolutely an anomaly. Like other experts, he said it would have been impossible to predict when or if a serac a pinnacle from a glacier s overhang could break off, as it did on Sunday.
The temperature on the 3,300 metre 11,000 ft high peak had topped 10 C 50 F, much higher than usual, according to Alpine rescuers on Sunday. Operators of shelters along the mountainside said temperatures at the 2,000 metre 6,600 ft level recently reached 24 C 75 F hitherto-unheard of heat in a place where excursionists go in summer to stay cool.
The glacier, in the Marmolada range, is the largest in the Dolomite mountains in north-eastern Italy and popular with skiers in winter. The glacier has melted away rapidly over the past decades, with much of its volume gone. Experts at Italy's state-owned CNR research centre, which has a polar sciences institute, estimated a couple of years ago that the glacier will cease to exist within 25 -- 30 years.
The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries like Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a hot spot that is likely to suffer heatwaves and water shortages, among other consequences of the crisis.