Mont Blanc
Mont Blanc ( ; , both meaning "white mountain") is the highest mountain in the Alps and Western Europe, rising above sea level. It is the second-most prominent mountain in Europe, after Mount Elbrus, and it is the eleventh most prominent mountain summit in the world. The mountain stands between the regions of Aosta Valley, Italy, and Savoie and Haute-Savoie, France. It gives its name to the Mont Blanc massif, bordering Switzerland and forming part of a larger range referred to as the Graian Alps. The location of the summit of Mont Blanc is on the watershed line between  the valleys of Ferret and Veny in Italy and the valleys of Montjoie, and Arve in France, on the border between the two countries. Ownership of the summit area has long been a subject of historical dispute between the two countries. The Mont Blanc massif is popular for outdoor activities like hiking, climbing, trail running and winter sports like skiing, and snowboarding. The most popular climbing route to the summit of Mont Blanc is the Goûter Route, which typically takes two days. The three towns and their communes which surround Mont Blanc are Courmayeur in Aosta Valley, Italy; and Saint -Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix in Haute-Savoie, France. The latter town was the site of the first Winter Olympics. A cable car ascends and crosses the mountain range from Courmayeur to Chamonix, through the Col du Géant. The Mont Blanc Tunnel, constructed between 1957 and 1965, runs beneath the mountain and is a major transalpine transport route. History. Since 1760 Swiss naturalist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure began to go to Chamonix to observe Mont Blanc. He tried with the Courmayeur mountain guide Jean-Laurent Jordaney, a native of Pré-Saint-Didier, who accompanied De Saussure since 1774 on the  Miage Glacier and on Mont Crammont. The first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc (at the time neither within Italy nor France) was on 8 August 1786 by Jacques Balmat and the doctor Michel Paccard. This climb, initiated by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who gave a reward for the successful ascent, traditionally marks the start of modern mountaineering. The first woman to reach the summit was Marie Paradis in 1808. Nowadays the summit is ascended by an average of 20,000 mountaineer tourists each year. It could be considered a technically easy, yet arduous, ascent for someone well trained and acclimatised to  the altitude. From l'Aiguille du Midi (where the cable car stops), Mont Blanc seems quite close, being higher. But while the peak seems deceptively close, the La Voie des 3 Monts route (known to be more technical and challenging than other more commonly used routes) requires more ascent over two other mountains, Mont Blanc du Tacul and Mont Maudit, before the final section of the climb is reached and the last push to the summit is undertaken. Each year climbing deaths occur on Mont Blanc, and on the busiest weekends, normally around August, the local rescue service performs an average  of 12 missions, mostly directed to aid people in trouble on one of the normal routes of the mountain. Some routes require knowledge of high-altitude mountaineering, a guide (or at least an experienced mountaineer), and all require proper equipment. All routes are long and arduous, involving delicate passages and the hazard of rockfall or avalanche. Climbers may also suffer altitude sickness, occasionally life-threatening, particularly if they do not acclimatise to it. Ownership of the summit. At the scale of the Mont Blanc massif, the border between Italy and France passes along most of the main Alpine watershed, from  the Aiguille des Glaciers to Mont Dolent, where it reaches the border with Switzerland. However, its precise location near the summits of Mont Blanc and nearby Dôme du Goûter has been disputed since the 18th century. Italian officials claim the border follows the watershed, splitting both summits between Italy and France, while French officials claim the border avoids the two summits, making both of them in France only. The size of these two (distinct) disputed areas is approximately 65 ha on Mont Blanc and 10 ha on Dôme du Goûter. Since the French Revolution, the issue of the ownership of  the summit has been debated. From 1416 to 1792, the entire mountain was within the Duchy of Savoy. In 1723, the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, acquired the Kingdom of Sardinia. The resulting state of Sardinia was to become preeminent in the Italian unification. In September 1792, the French Revolutionary Army of the Alps under Anne-Pierre de Montesquiou-Fézensac seized Savoy without much resistance and created a department of the Mont Blanc. In a treaty of 15 May 1796, Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia was forced to cede Savoy and Nice to France. In article 4 of this  treaty, it says: "The border between the Sardinian kingdom and the departments of the French Republic will be established on a line determined by the most advanced points on the Piedmont side, of the summits, peaks of mountains and other locations subsequently mentioned, as well as the intermediary peaks, knowing: starting from the point where the borders of Faucigny, the Duchy of Aoust and the Valais, to the extremity of the glaciers or Monts-Maudits: first the peaks or plateaus of the Alps, to the rising edge of the Col-Mayor". This act further states that the border should be  visible from the town of Chamonix and Courmayeur. However, neither is the peak of the Mont Blanc visible from Courmayeur nor is the peak of the Mont Blanc de Courmayeur visible from Chamonix because part of the mountains lower down obscure them. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna restored the King of Sardinia in Savoy, Nice, and Piedmont, his traditional territories, overruling the 1796 Treaty of Paris. Forty-five years later, after the Second Italian War of Independence, it was replaced by a new legal act. This act was signed in Turin on 24 March 1860 by Napoleon  III and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, and deals with the annexation of Savoy (following the French neutrality for the plebiscites held in Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Romagna to join the Kingdom of Sardinia, against the Pope's will). A demarcation agreement, signed on 7 March 1861, defined the new border. With the formation of Italy, for the first time Mont Blanc was located on the border of France and Italy, along the old border on the watershed between the department of Savoy and that of Piedmont formerly belonging to the Kingdom of Savoy. The 1860 act and attached maps  are still legally valid for both the French and Italian governments. In the second half of the nineteenth century, on surveys carried out by a cartographer of the French army, Captain JJ Mieulet, a topographic map was published in France, which incorporated the summit into French territory, making the state border deviate from the watershed line, and giving rise to the differences with the maps published in Italy in the same period. NATO maps take data from the Italian national mapping agency, the Istituto Geografico Militare, which is based upon past treaties in force. Modern Swiss mapping, published by the  Federal Office of Topography, plots a region of disputed territory (statut de territoire contesté) around the summits of both Mont Blanc and the Dôme du Goûter. One of its interpretations of the French-Italian border places both summits straddling a line running directly along the geographic ridgeline (watershed) between France and Italy, thus sharing their summits equally between both states. However, a second interpretation places both summits, as well as that of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur (although much less clearly in the latter case), solely within France. As of 2021, the border dispute between the two countries is ongoing. Vallot . The first professional scientific investigations on the summit were conducted by the botanist–meteorologist Joseph Vallot at the end of the 19th century. He wanted to stay near the top of the summit to undertake detailed research, so he built his permanent cabin. Janssen observatory. In 1890, Pierre Janssen, an astronomer and the director of the Meudon astrophysical observatory, considered the construction of an observatory at the summit of Mont Blanc. Gustave Eiffel agreed to take on the project, provided he could build on a rock foundation, if found at a depth of less than below the ice. In 1891 , the Swiss surveyor Imfeld dug two horizontal tunnels below the ice summit but found nothing solid. Consequently, the Eiffel project was abandoned. Despite this, the observatory was built in 1893. During the cold wave of January 1893, a temperature of was recorded on Mont Blanc, being the lowest ever recorded there. Levers attached to the ice supported the observatory. This worked to some extent until 1906 when the building started leaning heavily. The movement of the levers corrected the lean slightly, but three years later (two years after Janssen's death), a crevasse started opening under the observatory. It was  abandoned. Eventually the building fell, and only the tower could be saved "in extremis". Air crashes. The mountain was the scene of two fatal air crashes; Air India Flight 245 in 1950 and Air India Flight 101 in 1966. Both planes were approaching Geneva Airport and the pilots miscalculated their descent; 48 and 117 people, respectively, died. The latter passengers included nuclear scientist Homi J. Bhabha, known as the "father" of India's nuclear programme. Tunnel. In 1946, a drilling project was initiated to carve a tunnel through the mountain. The Mont Blanc tunnel would connect Chamonix, France, and Courmayeur , Italy, and become one of the major transalpine transport routes between the two countries. In 1965, the tunnel opened to vehicle traffic with a length of . 1999 disaster. In 1999, a transport truck caught fire in the tunnel beneath the mountain. In total 39 people were killed when the fire raged out of control. The tunnel was renovated in the aftermath to increase driver safety. Renovations include computerised detection equipment, extra security bays, a parallel escape shaft, and a fire station in the middle of the tunnel. The escape shafts also have clean air flowing through them via vents. Any  people in the security bays now have live video contact to communicate with the control centre. A remote site for cargo safety inspection was created on each side: Aosta in Italy and Passy-Le Fayet in France. Here all trucks are inspected before entering the tunnel. These remote sites are also used as staging areas to control commercial traffic during peak hours. The renovated tunnel reopened three years after the disaster. Incidents involving children. The record for the youngest person to climb Mont Blanc was set in 2009 by 10-year-old Asher Silver (UK). In July 2014, an American  entrepreneur and traveller Patrick Sweeney attempted to break the record with his nine-year-old son P.J. and 11-year-old daughter Shannon. They were caught in an avalanche, escaped death and decided not to pursue their attempt. In August 2014, an unknown Austrian climber with his 5-year-old son were intercepted by mountain gendarmes at and forced to turn around. On 5 August 2017, 9-year-old Hungarian twins and their mother were rescued from by helicopter while their father and family friend continued their summit attempt. Elevation. The summit of Mont Blanc is a thick, perennial ice -and-snow dome whose thickness varies. No exact and permanent summit elevation can therefore be determined, though accurate measurements have been made on specific dates. For a long time, its official elevation was . In 2002, the IGN and expert surveyors, with the aid of GPS technology, measured it to be . After the 2003 heatwave in Europe, a team of scientists remeasured the height on 6 and 7 September. The team was made up of the glaciologist Luc Moreau, two surveyors from the GPS Company, three people from the IGN, seven expert surveyors, four mountain guides from Chamonix and Saint-Gervais  and four students from various institutes in France. This team noted that the elevation was , and the peak was away from where it had been in 2002. After these results were published, more than 500 points were measured to assess the effects of climate change and the fluctuations in the height of the mountain at different points. Since then, the elevation of the mountain has been measured every two years. The summit was measured again in 2005, and the results were published on 16 December 2005. The height was found to be , more than the previous recorded height. The rock  summit was found to be at , some west of the ice-covered summit. In 2007, the summit was measured at and in 2009 at . In 2013, the summit was measured at and in 2015 at . From the summit of Mont Blanc on a clear day, the Jura, the Vosges, the Black Forest and the Massif Central mountain ranges can be seen, as well as the principal summits of the Alps. Fatalities. A 1994 estimate suggests there had been 6,000 to 8,000 alpinist fatalities in total, more than on any other mountain. Despite unsubstantiated claims recurring in media that "some estimates  put the fatality rate at an average of 100 hikers a year", actual reported annual numbers at least since the 1990s are between 10 and 20: in 2017, fourteen people died out of 20,000 summit attempts and two remained missing; with 15 in 2018 as of August. A French study on the especially risky "Goûter couloir, on the normal route on Mont Blanc" and necessary rescue operations found that between 1990 and 2011, there were 74 deaths "between the Tête Rousse refuge (3,187 m) and the Goûter refuge (3,830 m)". There were 17 more in 2012–15, none in 2016, and  11 in 2017. Note that these numbers do not count the fatalities of Air India Flight 245 and Air India Flight 101, two planes under the Air India airline that crashed into Mont Blanc. Climbing routes. Several classic climbing routes lead to the summit of Mont Blanc: Refuges. Impacts of climate change. Recent temperature rises and heatwaves, such as those of the summers of 2015 and 2018, have had significant impacts on many climbing routes across the Alps, including those on Mont Blanc. For example, in 2015, the Grand Mulets route, previously popular in the 20th century, was blocked by  virtually impenetrable crevasse fields, and the Gouter Hut was closed by municipal decree for some days because of a very high rockfall danger, with some stranded climbers evacuated by helicopter. In 2016 a crevasse opened at high altitude, also indicating previously unobserved glacial movements. The new crevasse forms an obstacle to be scaled by climbing parties on the final part of the itinerary to the top shared by the popular Goûter Route and the Grand Mulets Route. Protection. The Mont Blanc massif is being put forward as a potential World Heritage Site because of its uniqueness and its cultural importance , considered the birthplace and symbol of modern mountaineering. It would require the three governments of Italy, France and Switzerland to request UNESCO for it to be listed. Mont Blanc is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world, and for this reason, some view it as threatened. Pro-Mont Blanc (an international collective of associations for the protection of Mont Blanc) published in 2002 the book "Le versant noir du mont Blanc" (The black hillside of Mont Blanc), which exposes current and future problems in conserving the site. In 2007, Europe's two highest toilets (at a height  of 4,260 metres, 13,976 feet) were taken by helicopter to the top of Mont Blanc. They are also serviced by helicopter. They will serve 30,000 skiers and hikers annually, helping to alleviate the discharge of urine and faeces that spreads down the mountain face with the spring thaw, and turns it into 'Mont Marron'. Global warming has begun to melt glaciers and cause avalanches on Mont Blanc, creating more dangerous climbing conditions.