As regards glaciers, in the park 50 ice bodies are present covering about 40 km2. Among the others, Forni, at 12 km2 of area the largest Italian valley glacier. Its recent changes underlined a strong relation with regional and global climate evolution (Pelfini & Smiraglia, 1997; Smiraglia et al., 2007; Smiraglia et al., 2008); in addition this glacier was also inserted in the GOSITES list (Diolaiuti & Smiraglia, 2010), a list including all the geomorphological systems to be protected due to their high scientific, environmental and aesthetic values. On Forni Glacier since 2005 has been running the first Italian supraglacial automatic weather station (Citterio et al., 2007). The data collected were useful to model glacier energy and mass exchanges and to describe local micro-meteorology (Diolaiuti at al., 2009; Senese et al., 2010). Not only large glaciers are important for environmental studies; in fact, in the Park also smaller ones revealed important information.

The SHARE STELVIO project was developed by a group of researchers of the University of Milan, the Politecnico of Milan and CNR of Italy in the frame of the SHARE and the SHARE ITALY Projects promoted and managed by Ev-K2-CNR. The program is supported by the Lombardy Region under the umbrella of an agreement between the Lombardy Region and a regional research foundation: FLA (Lombardy Foundation for the Environment). The project aims at detecting and quantifying climate change evidences and effects on a sensible area located in the Italian Alps: The Stelvio National Park – Lombardy sector (600 km2 of area).

As regards permafrost, at the Stelvio-Livrio site (3000 m) since 1998 is active a borehole, performed in the framework of the international project PACE (Guglielmin, 2004; Harris et al., 2003) and equipped with thermistors and data loggers from the surface up to 100.3 m of depth. Thermal data indicate a possible permafrost base (cryopeg) located at about 200 m of depth or more, a very deep value for the Alps which suggests to focus here further investigations. Moreover in the Park are also present several rock glaciers, among the most interesting periglacial landforms (Smiraglia, 1985; 1987; Guglielmin, 1997) which whenever active are characterized by an ice core driving their dynamics and preserving important information on past environmental and climate history (Guglielmin et al., 2004; Stenni et al., 2007).