Officials says around 250,000 cubic metres of ice could break away from the Planpincieux glacier. Town leaders in Courmayeur are blaming climate change for the alert which is seeing a section of the glacier slide at more than half a metre a day. Courmayeur mayor Stefano Miserocchi has signed an order shutting a number of surrounding roads.
Mr Miserocchi said: ”These phenomena once again show how the mountain is going through a period of major change due to climate factors and, therefore, it is particularly vulnerable.”
The mayor said at the moment there were no threats to residential or tourist areas but ordered huts in the Rochefort region to be evacuated.
Experts have said they cannot predict the exact timet the glacier will collapse.
Planpincieux’s glacier has been monitored by experts for the past six years.
Mont Blanc is a major European tourist destination with 11 peaks at more than 4,000 feet high.
Moreno Vignolini, a press officer for civic authorities in Courmayeur, said: “With the strong heat of this summer, there was, between August and the first half of September, an acceleration of the melting of the glacier, at an average rhythm of 35 centimetres by day, up to peaks of 50 or 60 cm on certain days.”
The road closures are taking place in the Val Ferret valley on the Italian side of Mont Blanc.
Avalanches have threatened the hamlet of Planpincieux, which sits just below the glacier, over the last few years.
READ MORE: ‘Give it a rest Greta!’ Australian celeb tears into climate activist
“This is an alarm before which we cannot be indifferent in the illusion that it doesn’t regard me, you, that it is something far away in time or in space.
“Instead it should shake all of us and mobilise us.”
Latest surveys of the glaciers shows their surface has decreased by 40 percent since 1989.
Statistics show they have gone from 235 square miles to just 142 square miles today.
The number of glaciers has also decreased from 1,381 to 903 over the same period.
A recent alert for the region saw tourists restricted from some parts of the mountain range because rising tensions with locals.
Authorities in the Haute-Savoie region said “problems of public order have occurred on several occasions because climbers without a reservation have imposed themselves on the shelter, to the point of threatening the guardian’s physical integrity”.
Overcrowding was the cause of the problems, saiud officials.
Climbing Mont Blanc is fraught with danger and 15 people died trying to reach the summit in 2017.
Tourism in the Alps makes around £48billion a year for region and supports 12 per cent of employment.