In Switzerland, after a glacier collapsed onto Blatten, fear is gripping the mountains
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.
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Euronews
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Climate change is turning Switzerland's glaciers into ‘Swiss cheese'
Climate change appears to be making some of Switzerland's vaunted glaciers look like Swiss cheese: full of holes. Matthias Huss of the glacier monitoring group GLAMOS offered a glimpse of the Rhone Glacier, which feeds the eponymous river that flows through Switzerland and France to the Mediterranean. He shared the observation with The Associated Press this month as he trekked up to the icy expanse for a first 'maintenance mission" of the summer to monitor its health. The state of Switzerland's glaciers came into stark and dramatic view of the international community last month when a mudslide from an Alpine mountain submerged the southwestern village of Blatten. The Birch Glacier on the mountain, which had been holding back a mass of rock near the peak, gave way, sending an avalanche into the valley village below. Experts say geological shifts and, to a lesser extent, global warming, played a role. Fortunately, the village had been largely evacuated beforehand, but Swiss authorities said a 64-year-old man had gone missing after the incident. Late Tuesday, regional Valais police said they had found and were examining human remains of a person who died in the mudslide. The Alps and Switzerland, home to the most glaciers in any European country by far, have seen them retreat for about 170 years, but with ups and downs over time until the 1980s, he said. Since then, the decline has been steady, with 2022 and 2023 the worst of all. Last year was a 'bit better," he said. "Now, this year also doesn't look good, so we see we have a clear acceleration trend in the melting of glaciers,' said Huss, who is also a lecturer at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETHZ, said in beaming sunshine and with slushy ice dripping underfoot. Less snow and more heat create punishing conditions The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the second-warmest May on record worldwide, although temperatures in Europe were below the running average for that month compared to the average from 1991 to 2020. Europe is not alone. In a report on Asia's climate released Monday, the UN's World Meteorological Organisation said reduced winter snowfall and extreme summer heat last year 'were punishing for glaciers,' with 23 out of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and the Tian Shan range suffering 'mass loss' in 2024. A healthy glacier is considered "dynamic," by generating new ice as snow falls on it at higher elevations while melting at lower altitudes. The losses in mass at lower levels are compensated by gains above. 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Such an affected glacier, he said, "is a Swiss cheese that is getting more holes everywhere, and these holes are collapsing — and it's not good for the glacier.' Effects felt from fisheries to borders Richard Alley, a geosciences professor and glaciologist at Penn State University, noted that glacier shrinkage has wide impacts on agriculture, fisheries, drinking water levels, and border tensions when it comes to cross-boundary rivers. 'Biggest worries with mountain glaciers may be water issues. Now, the shrinking glaciers are supporting summertime (often the dry season) flows that are anomalously higher than normal, but this will be replaced as glaciers disappear with anomalously low flows,' he said in an email. For Switzerland, another possible casualty is electricity. The Alpine country gets the vast majority of its power through hydroelectric plants driven by its lakes and rivers, and wide-scale glacier melt could jeopardise that. With a whirr of a spiral drill, Huss sends ice chips flying as he bores a hole into the glacier. Then, with an assistant, he unfurls a jointed metal pole, similar to the basic glacier-monitoring technology that has existed for decades, and clicks it together to drive it deep down. This serves as a measuring stick for glacier depth. 'We have a network of stakes that are drilled into the ice where we determine the melting of the mass loss of the glacier from year to year,' he said. 'When the glacier will be melting, which is at the moment a speed of about 5 to 10 centimetres a day, this pole will re-emerge.' Reaching up over his head, about 2.5 metres, he points out the height of a stake that had been drilled in in September, suggesting that an ice mass had shrunk by that much. In the super-hot year of 2022, nearly 10 meters of vertical ice were lost in a single year, he said. 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'But on the other hand,' he added, "it's also a very interesting time as a scientist to be witness to these very fast changes.'
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