One person missing after mudslide buries Swiss mountain village
One person is missing after a deluge of rock, mud and ice buried 90% of a Swiss mountain village, officials have said.
It came after a glacier overlooking the settlement of Blatten, in southern Switzerland, partially collapsed on Wednesday, sending the debris raining down.
"An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley," Matthias Ebener, a spokesman for local authorities in the Valais canton.
He also confirmed one person was missing.
Approximately 300 residents, as well as livestock, were evacuated from the area on 19 May after geologists warned that a 1.5 million cubic meter (52 million cubic feet) glacier overlooking the village was at risk of imminent collapse.
Local councillor Stephane Ganzer told Swiss media that the mud and rockslide "at first glance covered 90% of the village".
Footage shared on social media showed the moment the debris came down, leaving behind destroyed buildings and other infrastructure in the village, which is nestled in the Loetschental valley.
Emergency services warned people that the area was hazardous and urged them to stay away.
Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter expressed her solidarity with villagers.
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Satellite images show Swiss village wiped out by glacier collapse
New terrifying satellite images have revealed how a tiny Swiss village was completely wiped out by a massive glacier collapse. The remote Alpine village of Blatten was flattened after an avalanche of rock, mud and ice was sent crashing down into the valley. Once home to around 300 people, it now lies buried beneath a vast expanse of debris after the Birch Glacier broke off on Wednesday afternoon. Authorities say 90 per cent of the village has been destroyed. New satellite pictures reveal the true scale of the disaster, showing where homes, farmland and roads once stood, now completely smothered by mud and rubble. The river Lonza, which runs through the valley, has been blocked by the landslide, which had raised fears of further flooding. But as reconnaissance flights and inspections continued, authorities said water from the newly formed lake, which has been slowly submerging the remaining houses in the obliterated village of Blatten, was beginning to find its way over, through and around the blockage. 'This development is positive, but we remain cautious,' said Stephane Ganzer, head of the regional security department. 'The risk remains, even if it is diminishing,' he told a press conference, adding that 'no evacuations are planned' in the villages downstream in the Lötschental valley, one of the most picturesque regions in southern Switzerland. The outflow "makes us optimistic and suggests that the water is finding a good path", explained Christian Studer of the Wallis canton's Natural Hazards Service. However, work to pump water from the lake has still not begun as the ground remains too unstable, particularly on the mountainside. One 64-year-old man is still missing. He was believed to be in the area at the time. Switzerland's president has pledged support for those forced to flee the Alpine village of Blatten, telling evacuees they are 'not alone' after a devastating glacier-triggered landslide wiped out homes and businesses. Karin Keller-Sutter made the comments on Friday after surveying the destruction by helicopter. She said the government was now working to calculate ways to help those affected by the disaster. 'The force with which the mountain here wiped out an entire village is indescribable,' said Keller-Sutter. 'I'd like to tell you all that you're not alone. The whole of Switzerland is with you — and not just (people) in Switzerland.' Officials have limited access to the area and warned that huge deposits of debris, stacked tens of metres high across a 2-kilometre stretch of the valley, have blocked the Lonza River and formed a new lake. The future course of the water remains uncertain. 'Unfortunately, the danger has not yet been averted,' Keller-Sutter added. Separate drone footage shown by national broadcaster SRF showed a vast plain of mud and soil completely covering part of the village and the river running through it. At around 3:30pm 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 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 village, including residents and a herd of 52 cows, had mostly been evacuated this week amid fears the 52mn cubic ft glacier was days away from collapse. '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.' 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. 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. 'it's a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,' he said, adding: 'There's a risk that the situation could get worse,' alluding to the blocked river. He said the army had been mobilised after earlier indications that the movement of the glacier was accelerating. 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.
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‘This is ground zero for Blatten': the tiny Swiss village engulfed by a mountain
For weeks the weight had sat above the village, nine million tonnes of rock precariously resting on an ancient slab of ice. A chunk of Kleines Nesthorn mountain's peak had crumbled, and its rubble hung over the silent, empty streets of Blatten, held back only by the glacier. The ice groaned beneath the pressure. On Wednesday afternoon, in an instant, it gave way. The ice cracked, then crumbled. The entire mass descended into the valley below, obliterating the village that had been there for more than 800 years. 'Blatten has been wiped away. Erased, obliterated, destroyed, stamped into the ground,' the village's mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said on Friday. 'The memories preserved in countless books, photo albums, documentation – everything is gone. In short, this is ground zero for Blatten.' Looking down from the slope above where the village once lay, you can still see the peaks of a few houses, piercing the mud. The valley is a lush sweep of green, pricked with wildflowers that have thrived on Switzerland's unusually long, warm spring. But its pasture is now bisected by an enormous brown-grey mass of dirt, ice and rock, dozens of metres thick and about two kilometres long. The avalanche hit the valley with such force it has washed up the other side like a wave in a bathtub. Almost all of the 300 residents had been evacuated a week earlier after authorities grew concerned about the stability of the mountain. One 64-year-old man, believed to have stayed in the area, is missing. As Blatten's people shelter in the adjacent villages, gratitude for having escaped alive is mixed with grief at the enormous loss: of homes, businesses, history. 'The people have lost everything, except for what they are currently carrying on their bodies,' Bellwald said. 'Houses, bridges, real estate – they no longer exist.' The scale of the glacial landslide that hit Blatten is near unprecedented in the Swiss Alps. But glaciers and permafrost are melting and destabilising across the world. As they do, terrain that was once frozen solid is crumbling and sinking. Some glacial lakes are overflowing, and rivers of ice that have endured for millions of years are cracking, shrinking and being loaded with debris. How these mixed structures of earth and ice will behave in a rapidly warming world is unpredictable. Those that collapse can send great waves of water, rock and ice downhill, obliterating everything in their path. 'What you're seeing is [happening] all over the world,' said Jan Beutel, a computer engineering scientist who specialises in seismic monitoring of mountain systems, as well as a mountaineer who knows the slopes surrounding Blatten well. He had been keeping a loose eye on the Birch glacier for weeks, and had a live stream running in the background as he worked on Wednesday – listening to its cracks and grumbles. As the noise grew, Beutel watched the collapse in real time. 'Suddenly, I saw the pixels exploding in the top half of the screen. I was just in awe,' he said. The impact was akin to a bomb going off. As the lens was obscured by the dust cloud, he searched for seismic data to estimate the size of the rockfall – and found it had registered as a 3.1 magnitude earthquake, one of the largest mass movements of earth ever recorded by the Swiss Seismological Service. 'For sure, there will be more. There will be harm to infrastructure, to livelihood, to interests,' he says. 'The same thing is taking place in all mountain areas. The glaciated areas are going back. The sustained snow cover is less over the years, and permafrost is warming at a global scale.' Stéphane Genoud, who lives in Anniviers, a short distance from Blatten, spoke during a pause between working to clear his property of broken trees – their trunks cracked by a year of unusual, sporadic dumps of snow. The Blatten disaster is only the latest and most dramatic of the changes that have transformed these valleys over his lifetime. 'The change is very rapid,' he says. 'We have less and less snow, the glaciers are all retreating, the ice that solidifies the rock is melting. There are routes in the high mountains that are no longer accessible.' 'An entire village disappearing under ice and rock is obviously not normal,' Genoud says. 'Imagine your village disappearing, under meters of scree. There is no village. In two minutes: the village is gone.' But he believes the collapse is part of a far larger disintegration, as global heating accelerates. 'Now, with climate change, the mountain is coming down,' he says. 'We are the canary in the coalmine – we are directly feeling the impact.' Even for those who spend their careers monitoring glaciers and their retreat, these sudden, catastrophic collapses are shocking. 'I've been astonished by the large-scale collapse and detachment of glaciers that has occurred in different parts of the world in recent years,' says Andrew Mackintosh, a glaciologist and professor of earth science at Monash University in Melbourne. 'This is not something that I anticipated, particularly situations where entire glaciers detach and then fall into the valleys below.' Often, the people living beneath were not as lucky as those in Blatten, which was almost completely evacuated before the collapse. During the 2002 Kolka-Karmadon glacier collapse in the Russian Caucasus mountains, more than 100 million cubic metres of ice and rock plummeted into the valley, depositing debris 130 metres thick. It completely buried the village of Nizhniy Karmadon, killing at least 120 people. In Italy, 11 died in the collapse of part of the Marmolada glacier in 2022. In Kyrgyzstan that same year, a group of British tourists were engulfed – but survived – an avalanche caused by the collapse of a glacier in the Tian Shan mountains. For Switzerland – a country used to managing significant natural hazards from its mountains – the devastation of Blatten represents a new kind of destruction. When the Swiss president, Karin Keller-Sutter, returned from a helicopter flight over the damage on Friday afternoon, she said the sight was 'apocalyptic'. 'It's practically levelled. There have always been landslides. But with those, something always remained. Here, nothing is visible any more.' Precisely attributing the Birch glacial collapse to climate change is not yet possible: even attribution studies for extreme weather take weeks or months, and landslides add an additional, complex set of factors to analyse. A recent review of 45 studies of landslides in the alps found a clear link between the heating climate and increased smaller rockfalls or landslides – but for huge rock avalanches, there was not enough data to conclusively say. Exact attribution is almost beside the point, however, says Mackintosh: the climate crisis is already clearly destabilising alpine environments, and transforming entire ecosystems. 'The melting of mountain permafrost – frozen ground that literally glues together the high alpine summits – leads to unstable situations where whole mountain slopes can collapse under their own weight,' sayssaid Mackintosh. In temperate glaciers, this can create a kind of feedback loop: the blanket of rock that coated Birch glacier speeded its melting. 'These processes lead to a condition where a catastrophic landslide of rock, ice and snow is possible, with devastating consequences.' From the hiking tracks that twine around the mountain above Blatten, the scale of that devastation is clear. Other than a few crested rooftops, nothing remains. The valley is mostly silent, broken by birdsong and the growl of a helicopter above the debris, watching for any movement. Authorities say there is no timescale for accessing the site: it is still too unstable. The sea of rock that covers it is threaded by tracks of water. When the landslide hit, it dammed the Lonza River, which ran through the valley, and regional authorities feared 'a torrential lava flow if the river overflows'. Now the water has begun to eat its way through. In Kippel, which lies just a few minutes drive from Blatten, locals gathered to watch the new flow of brown, roiling water wind through the valley below. None of Blatten's evacuees, other than town officials, have yet spoken publicly about the loss of their town. 'You can imagine, this was a very quiet, closed, introverted place even before,' says Brigitte Burgisser, who manages a meditation centre in neighbouring Kippel. 'Now, there is such grief as well.' The tiny, tight-knit community that lived here hope to rebuild. The valley without Blatten is 'unthinkable,' says the mayor, Bellwald. But where or when they can do so is not clear. For now, the only version of Blatten village that exists is invisible, Bellwald says, held in the minds of the people that have left. 'We carry that with us very carefully, as a memory.'
