Marmolada: the highest peak in the Dolomites and its shrinking glacier
Punta Penia, at 3,343 metres, is the highest point in the Dolomites, and on its north side lies the range's only large glacier. On the mountain's two faces, what the ice measurements show and the summer of 2022.
Marmolada is the highest mountain in the Dolomites. Its top, Punta Penia, stands at 3,343 metres, and on its north side lies the only large glacier in the range. That glacier is shrinking fast, and it has already changed how the mountain looks.
The mountain has two completely different faces, and the difference between them is what makes it so easy to recognise. Here is what the shape tells you, what the glacier measurements show, and what happened in the summer of 2022.
Two faces of one mountain
From the south, Marmolada is a sheer wall of limestone. From the north, it is a slope covered in ice running down towards the lake Lago di Fedaia. Between them runs a ridge with several summits, of which Punta Penia is the highest and Punta Rocca, at 3,309 metres, the second.
The geology is the same as in the rest of the Dolomites: mountains built up in a shallow tropical sea during the Triassic, which we cover in our piece on the Dolomites as a coral reef. But no other summit in the Dolomites carries a glacier of this size.
A glacier measured every year
The glacier has been retreating for a long time, and the measurements show it is going quickly. A study presented by the Italian National Research Council, CNR, in 2019 found that between 2004 and 2015 the glacier lost 30 per cent of its volume and 22 per cent of its area. The researchers estimated then that it could be practically gone within 25 to 30 years.
The September 2026 survey, carried out by the environmental agency of the Veneto region with the University of Padua and Italian glaciologists, measured an area of 83 hectares, down from 92 the year before. The glacier front had retreated by 23 metres on average in a single year.
3 July 2022
On 3 July 2022, shortly after lunchtime, a large mass of ice broke away near Punta Rocca and swept down the slope where hikers and climbers were on their way up. Eleven people died and eight were injured. The day before, the temperature at the summit had been around ten degrees.
The disaster drew wide attention and has since been studied closely by researchers. For anyone looking at the mountain today, it is also a reminder that a glacier does not only shrink slowly and quietly. It can change in an instant.
The first ascent
Punta Penia was first climbed in 1864 by the Austrian mountaineer Paul Grohmann together with Angelo and Fulgenzio Dimai.
The wall and the glacier on one piece
On the Marmolada piece both faces show at once: the sheer south wall, the ridge with Punta Penia and the long glacier slope down to Lago di Fedaia. The window is 14 kilometres wide. In relief the contrast is clearer than in a photograph, because you see the whole massif from above rather than one side at a time.
Its neighbour in the range is Cortina, the valley with its steep limestone massifs a few dozen kilometres to the east. More Alpine subjects are among our 3D topographic maps.
