Italian heat speeding glacier melt

(ANSA) - Aosta, August 3 - The unusually hot summer along the peninsula is accelerating the melt of snow and ice in glaciers high in the Italian Alps, experts warned Monday.
    At the summer's mid-point, the amount of melt is already at levels normally not seen until the end of summer, said the Foundation for Secure Mountains, based in Italy's Aosta Valley.
    It has been surveying a number of glaciers including Le Petit Grapillon on Mont Blanc, Rutor on La Thuile, and Grand Vallon Timorion on Grand Paradise.
    2015 will be "a year of great loss of glaciers Aosta Valley," said the foundation.
    The scalding-hot temperatures were expected to push the thermometer up as high as 41 degrees Celsius on Sardinia on Tuesday, made even worse by high levels of humidity, said weather specialists at website 3bmeteo.com.
    And that is only a first taste of what is likely to hang around Italy for the rest of the week, as a new African weather system blows in, they added.
    Italian temperatures in July set new records "and August seems to want to follow in the same footprints," the 3bmeteo.com specialists.
    Across Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio and Sardinia, the heat wave will last as long as eight more days - almost to mid-August. The hottest cities are likely to include Turin, Milan, Verona, Trento, Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Rome and Nuoro. The heat wave had badly hit Italian agricultural and fisheries output.