Water

Italian glaciers

The Italian Glaciers Registry, compiled between 1959 and 1962, by the Italian Glaciology Committee and by the CNR (Italian National Research Centre), identified 838 glaciers with a total surface of 540 km2. of which almost 100 km2 in the Ortles-Cevedale Massif, followed by the Adamello-Presanella group and the Mont Blanc Group. On the Apennines there is only one glacier which is becoming extinct, the Calderone Glacier, a small strip on the Gran Sasso d’Italia.
The glaciers with the largest extension in the Italian Alps are the Forni Glacier in the Ortles-Cevedale Massif, with a surface area of 13 km2 in 1989, which competes for the first position in Italy with the Adamello Glacier with a surface area of 18 km2,  which is however divided into various distinct flows. The Forni Glacier consists of three accumulation basins whose flows converge in a vast tongue that descends into the valley while the Adamello Glacier is on a plateau, a kind of small ice-sheet called Pian di Neve, from which numerous minor tongues and ice streams descend.