The Italian army's Julia Alpine brigade recovered and neutralised 250 unexploded munitions from rapidly retreating glaciers in the Dolomites this summer — including 18 Italian 75mm artillery shells and 37 French-made Thevetot mortar bombs. The weapons date to the so-called White War of 1915-1918, fought between Austro-Hungarian and Italian forces across some of the most hostile terrain on the Western Front. Hikers reported multiple sightings near Canal San Bovo in the Primiero Valley, triggering an extensive military sweep across high-altitude and glacier sites in the Trentino Alto Adige region. This is not new. Relics of the White War have been surfacing since the 1990s, when global heating first began peeling back the ice that had sealed them in for nearly a century. What is new is the acceleration. Stefano Morosini, a professor at the University of Bergamo and coordinator of heritage projects at Stelvio National Park, stated plainly: each year the number of dangerous artefacts emerging is higher than the last. Many are live and extremely dangerous after more than 100 years of preservation in ice. The glacier retreat is not just releasing munitions. Wooden barracks, straw beds, clothes, lanterns, newspapers, postcards, coins, and tinned food emerged from a cave shelter on the 3,095-metre Mount Scorluzzo in 2015 after the ice that had sealed it since November 1918 completely melted. Dozens of corpses — some still in uniform — have surfaced in the past 15 years. In 2017, the relatives of an Italian soldier were able to bury him after identity documents were found with his body on Presena glacier. The White War is thought to have killed more than a million people, the majority from avalanches, falls, and hypothermia rather than combat. A museum to house the recovered relics is scheduled to open in Bormio in June 2027. The historical recovery is genuine and culturally significant. But it comes tethered to a physical hazard that scales with temperature. Morosini warned that intense summer heatwaves at altitude are making glacier access increasingly unsafe. The catastrophic collapse of Marmolada glacier in 2022, which killed 11 people, illustrated the stakes. The advice to hikers is unambiguous: never touch any explosive device and report discoveries to police immediately. The structural dynamic here is straightforward. A century of war detritus was locked in cold storage by ice, and climate change is now thawing that storage at an accelerating rate. The cost falls on Italian public services — military bomb disposal, emergency response, park management — while the underlying driver, global emissions, is diffuse and borderless. There is no off switch. The only question is how fast the annual munitions count climbs and whether disposal capacity keeps pace. This is a slow-motion logistics crisis disguised as a heritage story. Every degree of warming releases more ordnance, more bodies, more contamination into alpine terrain used by hundreds of thousands of hikers annually. The Italian state absorbs the cost. The emissions that drive the thaw are everybody's and nobody's.
