Monitoring the ongoing dramatic retreat of glaciers around the world is often a matter of incremental comparison — a photo taken in the same place, year after year, showing the ice retreating up a mountainside, or across a high plain, until nothing remains. But sometimes we get a dramatic demonstration of what climate change is doing to the world’s mountain ice: a huge glacier in the Swiss Alps collapsed on Wednesday, burying almost all of the town of Blatten in a pile of ice, dirt, and rubble.
“What I can tell you at the moment is that about 90% of the village is covered or destroyed, so it’s a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,” an official told a local news station. “There’s a risk that the situation could get worse.”
Authorities had been monitoring the potential for landslides under the Birch glacier for months, and had evacuated around 300 people — as well as more than 50 cows, airlifted via helicopter — from the area only about ten days before the collapse. According to various reports, one person is missing after the catastrophe.
The event is not the first time in recent years the melting of Alpine glaciers has resulted in disaster. In the summer of 2022, after a month of record-shattering temperatures in Europe, a piece of a glacier at the Italian Dolomites peak of Marmolada collapsed, killing 11 people. In the new event at least, a previous landslide that set up the larger collapse was observed first, allowing for the evacuation to proceed. Still, it is likely that almost all of the buildings in Blatten are essentially destroyed.
This will keep happening. The latest analysis of Swiss glacial mass balance found that they collectively lost 2.5 percent of their volume in 2024 — an enormous amount of ice, though dwarfed by the 10 percent loss that occurred across 2022 and 2023. And it’s not just Switzerland, and not just the Alps. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which keeps careful tabs on a collection of reference glaciers around the globe, says that those have lost 30 “meter water equivalent” units since 1950 — a single m.w.e means they lose 1,000 kilograms of mass for every square meter the glacier covers, or about 1.1 meters of ice thickness across a glacier. Though literally every region they study is losing glacial ice, central Europe is losing it faster than the rest.
Residents of Blatten are promising to rebuild their broken town. Europe and elsewhere will see more of this, for a while, until there’s no more ice to fall.
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