In this extract from 'The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World', James Crawford travels in search of the Grafferner glacier, which forms part of the borderline between Austria and Italy. When this glacier moves, the border moves too. Since 2005 it has been constituted in law as a confine mobile – a 'moving border'. A border defined and shaped by gravity, and now melting and slipping at an alarming rate due to the impacts of climate change…
It was seven in the morning, early September, just a few hundred metres north of the Italian–Austrian border on the Hochjochferner glacier.
The Norwegian/Finnish border has changed recently too. The Norwegians transferred an island in the border river to Finland when the deepest channel around the island changed from being between Finland and it, to between Norway and the island. This is what the border treaty stated, so they just gave up the land.
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