A huge chunk of a glacier in the Swiss Alps broke off on Wednesday afternoon, causing a deluge of ice, mud and rock to bury part of a mountain village evacuated earlier this month due to the risk of a rockslide, authorities said.
One person is currently missing, officials said.
Local authorities describe the situation as “very bad”, and have requested support from the Swiss army’s disaster relief unit. Members of the Swiss government are on their way to the scene.
The village’s 300 inhabitants had to leave their homes on 19 May after geologists monitoring the area warned that the glacier appeared unstable. Now many of them may never be able to return.
The disaster that has befallen Blatten is the worst nightmare for communities across the Alps.
Climate change is causing the glaciers – frozen rivers of ice – to melt faster and faster, and the permafrost, often described as the glue that holds the high mountains together, is also thawing.
Drone footage showed a large section of the Birch glacier collapsing at about 15:30 (14:30 BST) on Wednesday. The avalanche of mud that swept over Blatten sounded like a deafening roar, as it swept down into the valley leaving an enormous cloud of dust.
Glaciologists monitoring the thaw have warned for years that some alpine towns and villages could be at risk, and Blatten is not even the first to be evacuated.
In eastern Switzerland, residents of the village of Brienz were evacuated two years ago because the mountainside above them was crumbling.
Since then, they have only been permitted to return for short periods.
In 2017, eight hikers were killed, and many homes destroyed, when the biggest landslide in over a century came down close to the village of Bondo.
The most recent report into the condition of Switzerland’s glaciers suggested they could all be gone within a century, if global temperatures could not be kept within a rise of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, agreed ten years ago by almost 200 countries under the Paris climate accord.
They flew an injured cow out of that village by helicopter. Kind of demonstrates their priorities in the face of climate breakdown.
That reminds me of a great problem with getting people to evacuate before a hurricane: Evacuation shelters* didn’t allow pets, and people did not want to abandon them at home. Nowadays, part of the evacuation includes support for pet evacuation.
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*This was also a problem with homeless shelters that didn’t allow pets. When you’re homeless, sometimes a pet is the only friend you’ve got.