The Swiss village of Blatten was wiped out in seconds. A glacier collapsed above the village on 28 May, triggering a landslide. The 300 residents had been evacuated a week earlier, but a 64-year-old man who is believed to have stayed is missing.
Tess McClure, the Guardian’s commissioning editor for the Age of Extinction, reported on the aftermath.
“The Birch glacier, which sits above Blatten, is this ancient slab of ice,” she tells Helen Pidd. “It had been loaded up with rocks and debris from the mountain above and just gave way and crumbled.
“The millions of tonnes of rock, enormous chunks of ice, all of the mud and trees and debris that it had swept up along the way, all of that just fell down the mountain on to Blatten village.”
It will take time for scientists to determine the role that the climate crisis may have played in the collapse, but Tess explains why global heating will make events like this more common.
“What we can say is, basically, climate change is affecting all of the ingredients for a disaster like this. So we’re seeing glaciers around the world melt at an incredible rate. They’re shrinking, they’re cracking, they’re growing more unstable.
“We’re also seeing permafrost and ice, which in an environment like this is just the glue that holds parts of the earth, parts of the mountain, is kind of holding it all together, that permafrost is also melting.
“And we also know that climate change, higher temperatures and mountains are linked, from scientific studies, to higher rates of rockfall and higher rates of that kind of disintegration. So we can’t sort of say yes, the Birch glacier was climate change and climate change alone, but we can look at all of these factors, and all of them are related to global heating.”
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