They lay undetected for more than a century, a hidden legacy of the highest, most forbidding battlefield of World War I.

But last month, as Italy sweltered through one of the hottest summers on record, a cache of more than 200 rusted explosives emerged from beneath a melting sheet of ice in the Dolomite range in the country’s north....

...The explosives – probably stored in an ammunition dump carved into what was once a massive glacier – were discovered by mountain-rescue experts during a routine border-police patrol.

They emerged from the 3,200 meter (10,500 ft.) high Ago di Nardis glacier in the Trentino region of northern Italy, which during the First World War was bitterly contested by Italian troops fighting the opposing forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire....