In this extract from The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, James Crawford goes in search of the Grafferner glacier in the Italian-Austrian Alps. Straddling the border between the two nations, when this glacier moves, the border moves too. It is what is known in Italian as a confine mobile – constituted in law by Italy and Austria as a ‘moving border’. A border defined and shaped by gravity, and now melting at an alarming rate due to the impacts of climate change…
