Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images A glacier in the Italian Alps is turning pink as algae eats away at its snow. Algae that changes the color of snow or ice causes it to melt faster, a process which drives glacier melt across the globe. Glacier-eating algae could be seen more frequently as global temperatures rise. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. In the heart of the Italian Alps, a mountainside is blanketed in fields of watermelon-pink snow. Biagio Di Mauro, a researcher at the Institute of Polar Sciences at Italy's National Research Council, thinks the color change comes from a snow alga called Chlamydomonas nivalis.