The phenomenon of 'moving borders' changes the shape of countries

Climate change is accelerating the retreat of glaciers, forcing countries with glacier borders such as those in the Alps to adjust their maps.

Last year, Switzerland and Italy jointly re-adjusted their border in the Alps due to rapidly receding glaciers, a challenge that many countries with natural structures marking their territory will face, New Atlas reported on December 11.

The Matterhorn in the Alps is changing rapidly. (Photo: New Atlas).

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

After the adjustment in May 2023, it took Switzerland nearly 18 months to approve the change, and Italy has yet to sign off on the revised border map. The changes will affect the borders in the Plateau Rosa, Rifugio Carrel, Gobba di Rollin areas, which are located near 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 in late September, after reaching an agreement on the map change.

Despite differing views on climate change and global warming, glaciers around the world 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 increasing scientific attention.

A report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences published in October found that in 2024, despite ' extremely high winter snowfall' — about 30% more than average — large amounts of dust from the Sahara accelerated snowmelt, causing the glacier to lose 2.5% of its volume.

" The retreat and melting of glacier tongues continues due to climate change . The years 2022 and 2023 saw a total of 10% of the volume of Swiss glaciers disappear, the most ever recorded. This year's figure of 2.5% is also higher than the average of the past decade ," the report said. In a 2023 study, scientists modeled that a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures would cause more than a quarter of the Earth's current glacier surface to disappear by 2100.

The Matterhorn Gornergrat railway is one of the ways to reach the top of the Matterhorn from the Swiss side. (Photo: Peters/Flickr).

The Switzerland-Italy situation is not the only example of borders shifting as the natural environment changes . Sálajiegna, the glacier on the Norway-Sweden border , has two ice tongues, one running into Norway and one into Sweden . Over the past few decades, Sálajiegna has been retreating by about 20 m per year. In 2013, these changes also led to changes in access to water on both sides of the border. In addition, glacial 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 began the Italian Limes project , placing 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 a map plotter to draw a 'moving border' 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.

Beyond territorial changes, there are other issues with glacial borders. In Italy and Switzerland, heavily visited mountain areas along the border are becoming more vulnerable to landslides. This is consistent with a study in Nature that found an increase in the frequency and intensity of landslides in areas of glacier loss in the High Mountain Asia (HMA). This means that a hazard on one side of the border can have a major impact on those on the other.

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