According to the Dauphine Libere the summit of le Mont Blanc has lost 45cm over the last couple of years. The ice summit has also shifted location, 26 meters to the east, towards Italy.

The quantity of snow above 4 800 meters altitude is still more than 21,000 m³, that is 7,000 m3 more than during the 2003 heat wave but it has lost 2,500 m³ over the last couple of years. There is no risk of the summit melting in the foreseeable future, the average summit temperature is -17C.

In 2007 the height increase was attributed to global warming with warm westerlies bringing more moist snow at altitude. According to the weatherman the last couple of years haven’t seen so many of these air flows, hence the ice loss. There is always a logical explanation for everything if you try .

The rock summit is at 4792 meters, some 18 meters below the real summit. The rock summit is also growing, by 1mm a year due to land movements between the European continent and Africa.

http://ledauphine.com/chamonix/saint-gervaisil-@/index.jspz?chaine=23&article=217553

Interesting stuff, but the science is slightly misleading:
1) although ice doesn’t melt at -17C, it does sublimate (turn directly from solid to vapour: the same process as freeze drying). So you can still lose plenty of ice especially if it’s windy.
2) There wasn’t any “global warming” in 2007. There might have been local warming, but if you look at the Hadley global sea surface temperature anomaly, you’ll see that the temperature fell every year from 2003 to 2008. That’s to my mind why journalists have quietly stopped talking about “global warming” and now refer rather more ambiguously to “climate change”. The inconvenient truth is that the world has been cooling for the last five years. 2009 has been much warmer so far, though only at the average of 2003-2008. The hottest year was 1998.
I’d encourage you to look at the data for yourself at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadsst2gl.txt
So does that now mean that Mont Blanc is in Italy? Don’t think the Chamonix tourist office will be pleased with that…

niall - 07 November 2009 03:24 PM

That’s to my mind why journalists have quietly stopped talking about “global warming” and now refer rather more ambiguously to “climate change”.

I was just reading an article about Kilimanjaro where the ice is set to dissapear sometime in the next 20 or so years. They took ice cores around 2000 which showed a 2.5cm layer of dust. This was apparently due to a 300 year drought that affected the region and probably the middle east and beyond and may have ended the Akkadian empire, not a new theory… see this old Time article for details:-

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979122,00.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-will-melt-snows-of-kilimanjaro-within-20-years-1813631.html

Interesting that there could have been such a huge change in weather patterns, maybe something to do with the sun’s output?

Some maps show the frontier between Italy and France on the top of Mont Blanc de Courmayeur some on the summit of Mont Blanc (Italian).
Hope they never try and fight over it.