Remote sensing analysis of Marmolada (Italy) and Juuku pass (Kyrgyzstan) glacier collapses

Summer 2022, in less than a week, two glaciers collapsed. First in Italy on July 3 (Marmolada) then in Kyrgyzstan on July 9 (Juuku pass). The collapse of the Marmolada glacier caused eleven fatalities. In both cases, we immediately requested the tasking of Pléiades satellites to estimate the collapse volumes by photogrammetry. In both cases, the images were acquired three days after the event, and less than one day later we had the first estimates. We found that the Marmolada glacier lost 65,000 ± 10,000 m3. The Jukuu pass glacier lost a volume almost twenty times greater (1,145,000 m3), which remains however much lower than the volumes involved during the collapse of the Aru glaciers on the Tibetan plateau in 2016 (68 and 83 million m3) or the Kolka Glacier in 2002 (130 million m3). From the Marmolada elevation model and orthoimages we could also estimate that the rupture was approximately 80 m wide and 25 m deep.  In the case of the Juuku glacier, the tongue of the glacier collapsed entirely over a width of almost 300 m and the maximum elevation drop reached 50 m.