Latest news with #MatthiasBellwald
LeMonde
03-06-2025
- Climate
- LeMonde
In Switzerland, after a glacier collapsed onto Blatten, fear is gripping the mountains
On the still-snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps, the first warm days signaled the start of the snowmelt season, with vibrant spring wildflowers and lush green pastures where cows frolicked . But the idyllic picture ended lower down. The valley floor had been replaced by a monstrous, brown mass: 10 million cubic meters of crushed ice, rock and mud compacted together. The sublime had turned to sinister in a single glance. It all began in mid-May, when a peak called the Petit Nesthorn came under close watch after worrisome movements on its northern face triggered an initial alert. Debris began falling, piling up on the glacier just below, prompting the evacuation of residents and livestock − "as a pure precaution," according to local authorities − while waiting for the mountain to settle. "We will be able to return very soon," said Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of the 300-resident municipality. But "the unthinkable," as people now call it here, has ultimately shattered that easy confidence. It took less than 40 seconds for the Birch Glacier, at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, May 28, to bring an end to the 592 years of existence of the village of Blatten, known as much for the geraniums in the windows of its centuries-old larch chalets as for its resistance to mass tourism. In the Swiss Alpine imagination, already rich with legends, this Lötschental valley (in the canton of Valais, southern Switzerland) occupied a special place − a sort of original, Edenic sanctuary. Now, it holds a far darker distinction: It is the first to surrender a village to the combined forces of geology and a rapidly warming planet.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
‘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 from 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 hope to rebuild – the valley without Blatten is 'unthinkabl', says 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.'
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
‘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.'
The Independent
01-06-2025
- Climate
- The Independent
Flooding fears eased at picturesque Swiss Alpine village buried by landslide
A river in the Swiss Alps, which was dammed by a landslide that buried much of the village of Blatten, is now flowing through the debris, authorities have said. A huge mass of rock, ice and mud from the Birch glacier thundered into the Lötschental valley in southern Switzerland on Wednesday, destroying much of the village. Buildings that weren't buried were submerged in a lake created by the small Lonza River, whose course was dammed by the mass of material. The regional government in Valais canton said that the Lonza has been flowing through the full length of the debris since Friday. Geologist and regional official Raphaël Mayoraz said the level of the newly created lake has since gone down about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Authorities had previously worried that water pooling above the mass of rock and ice could lead to further risks. 'The speed at which this lake is emptying comes from the river eroding the deposit,' he said at a news conference. 'This erosion is relatively slow, but that's a good thing. If it is too fast, then there is instability in this channel, and that could lead to small slides of debris.' 'The Lonza appears to have found its way, but it too early to be able to give an all-clear,' said Matthias Bellwald, Blatten's mayor. The outlet of a dam downstream at Ferden, which is normally used to generate electricity, was opened partially on Friday evening to allow water to flow further down the valley and regulate the volume of water behind the dam. Authorities are still leaving open the possibility of evacuations further downstream if required, though the risk to other villages appears very low. Days before most of the glacier collapsed, authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as livestock, from Blatten. Switzerland's president said on Friday that the government was looking for ways to help the evacuees.
Yomiuri Shimbun
01-06-2025
- Climate
- Yomiuri Shimbun
A River Dammed by a Huge Swiss Landslide Is Flowing Again. That's a Relief to Authorities
Keystone via AP Check dams set up on the water from the Lonza river flows over the mud and stone, after the formation of a lake by the last houses of the village of Blatten, Switzerland, Saturday, May 31, 2025. GENEVA (AP) — A small Alpine river dammed by a landslide that largely buried the Swiss village of Blatten is now flowing through the debris, and the level of a newly created lake that raised worries about potential new destruction has fallen, authorities said Saturday. A huge mass of rock, ice and mud from the Birch glacier thundered into the Lötschental valley in southern Switzerland on Wednesday, destroying much of the village. Buildings that weren't buried were submerged in a lake created by the small Lonza River, whose course was dammed by the mass of material. Authorities worried that water pooling above the mass of rock and ice could lead to risks of its own. Still, the regional government in Valais canton (state) said that the Lonza has been flowing through the full length of the debris since Friday. Geologist and regional official Raphaël Mayoraz said Saturday that the level of the lake has since gone down about 1 meter (3.3 feet). 'The speed at which this lake is emptying comes from the river eroding the deposit,' he said at a news conference. 'This erosion is relatively slow, but that's a good thing. If it is too fast, then there is instability in this channel, and that could lead to small slides of debris.' 'The Lonza appears to have found its way, but it too early to be able to give an all-clear,' said Matthias Bellwald, Blatten's mayor. The outlet of a dam downstream at Ferden, which is normally used to generate electricity, was opened partially on Friday evening to allow water to flow further down the valley and regulate the volume of water behind the dam. Authorities are still leaving open the possibility of evacuations further downstream if required, though the risk to other villages appears very low. Days before most of the glacier collapsed, authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as livestock, from Blatten. Switzerland's president said on Friday that the government was looking for ways to help the evacuees.
