A glacier crashed on top of a hamlet, leaving it nearly destroyed.
Nearly the entire Alpine community was covered in mud after the glacier in question smashed down a Swiss mountainside onto Blatten and sent dust columns into the sky.
Approximately 300 residents of Blatten, in the southern Lötschental valley, were told to leave their houses earlier this month due to concerns over the glacier’s impending collapse.
According to NBC News, Stephane Ganzer, the security chief for the southern Valais area, called the event “a major catastrophe” and verified that the glacier landslip had destroyed about 90% of the settlement.
A significant portion of the Birch Glacier above the settlement broke off, creating the landslip, which buried the neighbouring Lonza River bed and increased the risk of blocked water flows, according to a statement from the regional government.
Only a few days after Blatten’s residents and their cattle were ordered to evacuate the area on May 19, the glacier crashed yesterday, May 28, after weeks of concerns.
Swiss glaciologists have frequently voiced their concerns about a recent thaw that has hastened the country’s glaciers’ retreat and is largely attributable to climate change.
Four percent of the landlocked Alpine nation’s total glacier volume vanished in 2023, making it the most glacier-rich country in Europe. Following a six percent reduction in 2022, that was the second-largest decline in a single year.
A 64-year-old man has been reported missing, although no one is believed to have killed in the event.
According to the Valais Cantonal Police, a search and rescue effort with a drone equipped with a thermal camera was underway for the guy, whose identity has not been disclosed.
Pictures of the glacier’s aftermath are heartbreaking. In earlier pictures, you can see lush grass, clear skies, and lovely lodges tucked away in the Lötschental valley. However, due to the glacier-caused landslip, which only a few houses survived, Blatten is now a sea of brown.
“The unimaginable has happened,” stated Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten, in a tearful speech.
He continued, as per BBC News: “We have lost our village, but not our heart. We will support each other and console each other. After a long night, it will be morning again.”
The collapse of the glacier is thought to have been caused by loosening of the permafrost zone’s rock mass brought on by climate change.
“Unexpected things happen at places that we have not seen for hundreds of years, most probably due to climate change,” Matthias Huss, the director of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS), told Reuters.
The Aletsch glacier is one of several glaciers in Switzerland that have melted recently.
Last year, the debris of a plane crash that occurred in 1968 among the Jungfrau and Mönch mountain peaks was found, solving a 50-year-old mystery caused by the melting of the ice caps.
