High in the craggy peaks of northern Italy’s Dolomites, record-breaking summer heat has peeled back layers of ice and revealed troves of 20th-century weaponry. Over the course of the summer, the Italian army recovered and defused some 250 explosive devices dating back to World War I, according to ANSA, an Italian news agency. The dangerous relics surfaced across high-altitude slopes and melting glaciers in the Trentino-Alto Adige region.
They were frequently spotted and reported by mountaineers and hikers. In one bizarre instance, firefighters found an unexploded 90-millimeter mortar shell while salvaging a car that had rolled into a ravine after the driver forgot to engage the handbrake, Barbie Latza Nadeau reports for CNN. That unexpected discovery in June was the first of the clean-up season for the Italian Army’s Julia Alpine brigade.
Specialists worked until mid-October across dizzying ridgelines, including the Carè Alto and Lares glaciers in the Adamello-Brenta area and near Cima Tre Cannoni and the Livrio glacier in the Stelvio region, according to a statement. Among the 250 recovered munitions were hand grenades, 75-millimeter artillery rounds and French-made Thevetot mortar shells, according to the Guardian’s Angela Giuffrida. The weaponry is a chilling vestige of the “White War,” a brutal campaign fought between the Austro-Hungarian and Italian militaries between 1915 and 1918 at elevations at times exceeding 10,000 feet.
Soldiers hacked tunnels directly into the ice, hoisted heavy field guns up sheer cliffs and endured chilling temperatures. The White War claimed an estimated 180,000 lives, largely though hypothermia, sheer falls and catastrophic avalanches, which proved far more lethal than enemy shells. When hostilities ceased in late 1918, both sides abandoned vast arsenals—and fallen soldiers—which were buried under winter snowdrifts and encased in solid glacial ice.
In 2015, thawing ice near the summit of Mount Scorluzzo revealed a wooden barracks built into a natural cavern at 10,154 feet. Sealed since the war ended in November 1918, the shelter was found astonishingly intact—complete with straw bedding, lanterns, uniforms, food tins, postcards and newspapers. While mountaineers have periodically found wartime relics since the 1990s, the speed and volume of discoveries have accelerated dramatically due to climate change.
A combination of low winter snowfall in 2025 followed by scorching summer temperatures in 2026 drove unprecedented glacial loss across northern Italy. They have been conserved by the ice for more than 100 years. Some had already exploded but many hadn’t, so now when they re-emerge, they are very, very dangerous.” Disarming century-old explosives in alpine environments was a grave logistical challenge.
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