The phenomenon of ‘moving borders’ changes the shape of countries

Last year, Switzerland and Italy jointly readjusted the border in the Alps due to rapidly shrinking glaciers. This is also a challenge that many countries with natural structures marking their territories will have to face, New Atlas reported on December 11.

Luckily Switzerland and Italy cooperated. Experts believe that partly because the land is not privately owned, and the national border is located on a mountaintop, the Swiss dividing line has shifted to Italian territory in recent years.

After the adjustment in May 2023, Switzerland still took nearly 18 months to approve the change, and Italy has not yet signed the revised border map. These changes will affect the borders in the areas of Plateau Rosa, Rifugio Carrel, Gobba di Rollin, which are located near the top of the Matterhorn – one of the famous landmarks of the Alps.

“With the melting of glaciers, these natural structures change and redefine national borders,” the Swiss government said in a statement at the end of September, after reaching an agreement on change map.

Despite differing views on climate change and global warming, the world’s glaciers are shrinking despite seasonal fluctuations and the natural movement of glaciers due to factors such as internal deformation. The impact of changing mountain landscapes on human populations is receiving great attention from the scientific community.

A report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences published in October showed that in 2024, despite “extremely large winter snow volumes” – about 30% more than average – large amounts of dust from the Sahara promotes snow and ice melt, causing glaciers to lose 2.5% of their volume.

“The shrinkage and melting of glacier tongues continues due to climate change. In 2022 and 2023, a total of 10% of Swiss glacier volume has disappeared, the most ever recorded. Number 2 .5% this year is also higher than the average of the past decade,” the report said. In a 2023 study, scientists modeled that a 1.5-degree increase in global temperatures would cause more than a quarter of Earth’s current glacier surface to disappear by 2100.

The Switzerland-Italy situation is not the only example of borders changing as the natural environment changes. Sálajiegna, a glacier on the Norwegian-Swedish border, has two ice tongues, one running into Norway and one into Sweden. Over the past few decades, Sálajiegna has shrunk by about 20 m per year. In 2013, these changes also led to changes in water access on both sides of the border. In addition, glacier borders exist between Switzerland and Austria, Chile and Argentina. The Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas of Central Asia, where Pakistan, India and China meet, is of great geopolitical importance.

In 2014, researchers started the Italian Limes project and placed GPS sensors along a stretch of the Italy-Austria border in the Ötztal Alps. The movement tracking system was improved two years later, with a network of 26 sensors feeding GPS data to plotters that transmit maps to draw “moving borders” between the two countries. The two countries reached a preliminary agreement in 2006 to work together on a more flexible approach to that dividing line.

In addition to territorial changes, there are still other issues related to glacier borders. In Italy and Switzerland, heavily touristed mountainous areas along the border are becoming more susceptible to landslides. This is consistent with a study in the journal Nature on the increase in frequency and intensity of landslides in glacier-losing areas of High Mountain Asia (HMA). This means that a danger that occurs on one side of the border can greatly affect those on the other side.

According to Swiss professor Adrian Brugger, the loss of glaciers in the Alps makes life much more dangerous for people near the mountains, on both sides. “There is a fear of displacement in settlements with 500-year-old houses. People live with a luggage bag next to their bed,” Brügger said.