In southern Switzerland, a large glacier collapse occurred on Wednesday, leading to the partial destruction of the small village of Blatten. The village had been evacuated a week prior due to the anticipated danger.
Many homes in the Alpine village, normally home to 300 people, were destroyed and one person is currently missing, officials said.
A video shared on YouTube captured the terrifying event as a massive cloud of ice and debris cascaded down the mountain slope into the valley where the village is situated.
Additional drone footage, televised by Swiss national broadcaster SRF, revealed a significant expanse of mud and soil that now covers a portion of the village and the river that flows through it.
At around 3:30 pm local time, a huge chunk of the Birch glacier broke off, according to emergency services in the Wallis region.
Local police said the missing 64-year-old man was a local resident who was in the area at the time of the incident.
A search and rescue operation was launched, with three rescue specialists airlifted to the scene, while a drone with a thermal imaging camera was also used.
‘Despite significant efforts, the man has still not been found,’ police said.
The glacier collapse had been expected for several days, and there have been no reports of injuries.
‘An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley,’ said Matthias Ebener, a spokesperson for local authorities in the southwestern canton of Valais.
‘We’ve lost our village,’ Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten told a press conference after the slide. ‘The village is under rubble. We will rebuild.’
Stephane Ganzer, an official in the canton of Valais where Blatten is located, told Swiss media that about 90% of the village was covered by the landslide.
Experts consulted by Reuters said it was difficult to assess the extent to which rising temperatures spurred by climate change had triggered the collapse because of the role the crumbling mountainside had played.
Christian Huggel, a professor of environment and climate at the University of Zurich, said while various factors were at play in Blatten, it was known that local permafrost had been affected by warmer temperatures in the Alps.
The loss of permafrost can negatively affect the stability of the mountain rock which is why climate change had likely played a part in the deluge, Huggel said.
The extent of the damage to Blatten had no precedent in the Swiss Alps in the current or previous century, he added.
A significant increase in activity was observed on the glacier from Tuesday night and intensified during Wednesday.
The Alps mountain range in Europe has seen its glaciers retreat in recent years due to warming that most scientists attribute to climate change.
Swiss glaciers, severely impacted by climate change, melted as much in 2022 and 2023 as between 1960 and 1990, losing in total about 10 percent of their volume.
The amount of snow covering Switzerland’s glaciers at the end of winter this year was 13 percent below the 2010-2020 average, a group of glacier monitoring experts said earlier in May.
It comes after hundreds were evacuated from the Alpine village in southern Switzerland amid fears of an imminent rockslide.
Residents – and a herd of 52 cows – were evacuated by authorities in Tuesday as a precaution.
Many feared they would never see their homes again as experts revealed 1.5 million cubic metres of had already tumbled down the mountainside.
Last Monday, some 200,000 cubic metres of rock descended down the mountain face, with the situation having stabilised by the next day.
Alban Brigger, a natural hazards engineer in Upper Valais, was even more stark in his warning last week – that the mountain is certain to collapse.
He added however that this event could potentially happen over several, smaller landscapes, rather than a widescale collapse that would obliterate the hamlet and nearby roads.
In 2023, residents of the village of Brienz in eastern Switzerland were evacuated before a huge mass of rock slid down a mountainside, stopping just short of the settlement.
Brienz was evacuated again last year because of the threat of a further rockslide.
Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter expressed her solidarity with the local population as emergency services warned people the area was hazardous and urged them to stay away, closing off the main road into the valley.
‘It’s terrible to lose your home,’ Keller-Sutter said on X.
The devastating glacier collapse comes days after five skiers were found dead on a glacier above a popular Swiss winter sports resort.
A helicopter was sent to survey the area around Rimpfischhorn, a 4,000-meter peak in the Valais Alps near the town of Zermatt on Sunday, after two hikers reported seeing abandoned skis.
Valais cantonal police revealed the victims were located on the Adler Glacier at varying altitudes on avalanche debris.
Air rescue service Air Zermatt said three bodies were located together in one area with rescue teams discovering the other two victims on a higher, narrower patch of snow the BBC reported.
Formal identification of the victims is ongoing and their nationalities have yet to be released.
The Rimpfischhorn is a 4,199-metre (13,776-foot) mountain that lies east of Zermatt, near the Italian border, and is popular with backcountry skiers.
