‘This is ground zero for Blatten’: the tiny Swiss village engulfed by a mountain | Environment

andOr weeks the weight sat over the village, Nine million tons of rocks Unstable rest on an old ice board. A large part of the Klains Nestonen Mountain summit has collapsed, and its ruins hung over the empty silent streets in Blatten, which were only given by the iceberg. The ice is under pressure.

Wednesday afternoon, in a moment, He gave the road. The ice is cracked, then it collapsed. The entire bloc slipped to the valley below, blurring the village, which was there for more than 800 years.

The village mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said on Friday: “Blatten has been eliminated. “Memories preserved in countless books, photo albums, and documents – everything is over. In short, this is scratch for Blatten.”

When looking down the slope above the place where the village was once, you can still see the peaks of some houses, and penetrate the mud. The valley is a green sweeping of green, tingling it with wild flowers that flourished on Switzerland A long, normal spring, warm. But its pasture is now encouraged through a huge brown gray mass of dirt, ice and rocks, and tens of meters, and its length is about two kilometers. Avalanche hit the valley with this strength, and the other side was washed like a wave in the bathtub.

Almost all 300 population was evacuated a week ago after the authorities were concerned about the stability of the mountain. A 64 -year -old man, believed to be in the area, is missing. While Patten people are mentioned in the neighboring villages, gratitude is mixed to escape alive with sadness on the enormous loss: from homes, companies and history. “People have lost everything, with the exception of what they are currently carrying on their bodies,” said Bellwald. “House, bridges, real estate – no longer exist.”

R.It is the scale of the ice collapse that struck Blatten near unprecedented in the Swiss Alps. But the ice rivers and frost soil dissolve and destabilize all over the world. As they do, the terrain that has been frozen once is solid Collapse. Some ice lakes overflow, rivers from ice that bore millions of years can crack, shrink and endure debris. How these mixed structures of Earth and ice behave in an unpredictable, warm world. Those who collapse can send large waves of water, rocks and slope ice, and obscure everything on their way.

“What you see is [happening] Jean -Biotel, a computer engineering scientist who specializes in seismic monitoring of mountain systems, in addition to a mountain climber who knows the slopes surrounding a good country, was still a loose observing on birch icebergs for weeks, and was running in the background on Wednesday – listening to cracks and peers.

With noise growth, Beutel watched the actual time. He said: “Suddenly, I saw the pixel units exploding in the upper half of the screen. I was in awe.” The effect was closer to a bomb. Since the lens was obscured by the dust cloud, he searched for seismic data to estimate the size of the rocks – and it was found that it was recorded as 3.1 earthquakes, one of the largest movements of the masses recorded by the Swiss earthquake service.

“Certainly, there will be more. There will be damage to infrastructure, to livelihoods, for interests,” he says. “The same thing happens in all mountainous areas. The ice areas return. Continuous snow cover is lower over the years, and frosty soil is associated with a global scale.”

Stéphane Genoud, who lives in Anniviers, spoke a short distance from Blatten, during a stopping period between work to disinfect his property of broken trees – its trunks crack for a year from the unusual blind from the snow. The Blatten disaster is only the latest and most changes that have turned these valleys over his life. “The change is very fast,” he says. “We have less and less snow, the ice rivers are retreating, and the ice that promotes the rock melts. There are roads in high mountains that can no longer access.”

Soldiers say: “It is clear that an entire village disappears under the ice and rock is not normal.” “Imagine that your village disappears, under meters of Mars. There is no village. In two minutes: the village disappeared.”

But the collapse believes is part of a much larger disintegration, as global heating is accelerating. He says, “Now, with climate change, the mountain comes down.” “We cany in CoalMine – we feel directly influenced.”

EFor those who spend their professional lives to monitor and retreat icebergs, these sudden catastrophic collapses are horrific. “I am astonished by the wide collapse and the separation of the ice rivers that have occurred in different parts of the world in recent years,” says Andrew McCaintech, an iceberg and professor of Earth sciences in Monash in Melbourne. “This is not something I expected, especially the situations in which the entire ice rivers separate and then fall into the valleys below.”

Often, the people who live below it were not lucky like those in Blatten, which were almost completely evacuated before the collapse. During 2002 Kolka-Karmadon Glacier GlacSer in the Russian Caucasus Mountains, more than 100 million cubic meters The ice and rocks decreased to the valley, and the thickness of the debris is 130 meters. He completely buried the village of Nizhniy Karmadon, At least 120 the people. In Italy, 11 died in the collapse of part of Marmolada Glacier in 2022. In Kyrgyzstan in the same year, a group of British tourists – was immersed – immersed – immersed. But they survived An ice collapse caused by an ice collapse in the Tian Chan Mountains.

to Switzerland A country used to manage large natural risks of its mountains – Blatten’s destruction is a new type of destruction. When Swiss President, Karen Keeler Street, returned from a helicopter flight due to the damage on Friday afternoon, she said the scene was “horrific”.

“It has been practically settled. There have always been landslides. But with those, something has always been left. Here, there is nothing visible anymore.”

The accurate proportions of the ice breakdown of the bitula to climate change are not yet possible: even the studies of the harsh weather takes weeks or months, and the landslides add an additional set of complex factors of the analysis. accident Review 45 studies I found from the landslides in the mountains of the Alps, a clear link between the heating climate and the increase in smaller rocks or the landslides – but for huge rock collapses, there was not enough data to say categorically. However, almost careful understanding next to the point, McCaintech says: The climate crisis clearly shakes the alpine environments and turns the entire ecosystems.

“The melting of the mountain mountains – the frozen earth that literally sparkling with the high peaks in the Alps – leads to unstable positions where the entire mountain slopes can collapse under its own weight,” says Mackintosh. In moderate icy rivers, this can create a kind of counter -feeding loop: the rock blanket that is hurried by the iceberg widowed from its melting. “These operations lead to a state in which the catastrophic landslide of rocks, ice and snow is possible, with devastating consequences.”

andROM follows long -distance walking around the mountain above Blatten, the size of this destruction is clear. Unlike a few roofs of homes, nothing remains. The valley is often silent, broken by Birdong and Grotl for a helicopter over the debris, monitoring any movement. The authorities say there is no time scope to reach the site: It is still very unstable. The rock sea that covers it is linked to water paths. When the landslide hit, the Lunza River, which was passing through the valley, was afraid of the regional authorities, “the flow of heavy volcanic lava if the river overflows.” Now the water began to eat its way. In Kopel, which is a few minutes’ drive from Blatten, the locals gathered to watch the new flow of brown winds across the valley below.

None of Putin, who was evacuated, unlike the city’s officials, spoke publicly about the loss of their city. “You can imagine that this was a very quiet and closed place even before,” says Brigitte Burgiser, who runs the center of meditation in the adjacent Kabil. “Now, there is such sadness too.”

A small, tight, coherent society here hopes to rebuild. Mayor Bellwald says that the valley without Blatten “cannot be conceived.” But where or when they can do so is not clear.

Currently, the only version of the existing village of Blatten is invisible, says Bellwald, who was held in the minds of the people who left. “We carry it with us very carefully, as a memory.”