Moment village is buried, with 'many homes' destroyed when massive glacier crashes down Swiss mountain
At around 3:30 pm local time, a huge collapse occurred on the Birch Glacier, emergency services in the Wallis region said.
Many homes in Blatten, normally home to 300 people, were destroyed, Jonas Jeitziner, deputy information officer for the regional emergency management service, told Switzerland's Keystone-ATS domestic news agency.
One person is currently missing, officials said.
The glacier collapse had been expected for several days.
Terrifying footage posted on YouTube showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountain slope and into the valley where the village is located. The debris reached the houses.
Separate drone footage broadcast by Swiss national broadcaster SRF showed a vast plain of mud and soil completely covering part of the village and the river running through it.
'An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley,' said Matthias Ebener, a spokesperson for local authorities in the southwestern canton of Valais.
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.
Residents were evacuated by authorities on Tuesday as a precaution, as scientists predict a further landslide of millions of cubic metres of rock within hours
A firefighter blocks traffic on a road as a security measure against a possible rockfall in the direction of Blatten in the canton of Valais on May 19
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.
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