Latest news with #Swiss
National Geographic
2 hours ago
- Science
- National Geographic
A Swiss village was buried under a mountain. This town could be next.
In the past century, scientists have observed more rockfalls and avalanches in the Alps, a looming threat to nearby villages. In this aerial view, rubble and ice fill a portion of the Loetschental Valley following a landslide on June 3, 2025 in Blatten, Switzerland. Over 317 million cubic feet of rubble, mud, and ice fell on to Blatten on May 28. Photograph by Robert Hradil, Getty Images Last month, Lukas Kalbermatten-Ritler stood in a hamlet overlooking the small Swiss village of Blatten opposite the Birch Glacier, holding up his camera phone up in disbelief. 'It was like a bomb went off,' says Kalbermatten-Ritler, who's home and historic third-generation family-owned Hotel Edelweiss was destroyed on May 28. 'There were black rocks coming like a wall over the glacier, like it was a big hand taking the village. This was the moment I stopped filming. I didn't want to film when my village was falling.' It took 28 seconds for the landslide from the collapse of the glacier to cover 600-year-old wooden homes in one of Switzerland's oldest and most picturesque valley villages in hard brown, cold sandpaper sludge that will be sinking for years. The collapse was so powerful it registered as a 3.1 magnitude earthquake. It was a village that scientists never expected to see almost completely buried by 328 million cubic feet of falling rock and ice. Destroyed houses float in the water from the river Lonza that formed a lake beside the massive avalanche, triggered by the collapse of the Birch Glacier. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP A house is submerged in water following a glacier collapse. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP Yet there are others, like Kandersteg, a Swiss tourist town nine miles away that scientists watch anxiously. It sits in the shadow of an unstable cliffside called Spitze Stei could trigger a landslide with twice the ice and rock debris that flattened Blatten. Scientists say it should have fallen by now. 'We can't predict exactly when disasters like this will happen,' says Matthias Huss, senior glaciologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and director of the Swiss glacier monitoring network. Even with the best rockfall, landslide, and avalanche monitoring systems in the world, Alpine towns remain in uncertain danger. Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year In the worst-case scenario, over 700 million cubic feet of limestone and marl will come crashing down into Lake Oeschinen, itself a result of landslides 3,200 years ago. The splash would send a wave 2.5 miles into the center of Kandersteg, covering around 25 percent of the town, including hotels, homes, and the school. Other less-severe, likelier, models show smaller, still destructive debris flows surpassing safety dams built by the village, according to Nils Hahlen, head of the natural hazard division for the Office of Forest and Natural Hazards in the Swiss canton, or state, of Bern. The landslide that devastated the town of Blatten was unexpected. In other, nearby villages, scientists have identified unstable cliff faces that might trigger similar tides of rock, water, and debris in the future. Photograph by Michael Buholzer, Keystone/AP 'But mountain people are robust. They don't move out of their villages because of changing threats unless authorities decide it's too risky to stay,' says Markus Stoffel, a geomorphologist at the University of Geneva who grew up near Blatten and Kandersteg. Most of the town's 1,300 residents remain. On mountain watch Four hours into what was billed as a 'short' (eight-mile) hike, I rest on a mossy stump while my 75-year-old mountain guide smokes a pipe. Mountain guides don't eat much, Fritz Loretan tells me. He's also a man of few words (clocking it down the trail in loafer sneakers with no tread), and when he talks about the looming threat in Kandersteg, he explains: 'When you grow up in the mountains, then you are used to them, and you won't feel safe in other places.' In 2018, while paragliding over Spitze Stei, Loretan's friend saw 'a cut in the mountain,' and alerted authorities. Experts realized the outer rock section could fall at any moment. That was the year Spitze Stei became the most watched rock in Switzerland via high-tech drones, radar surveys, GPS, and cameras. 'At Spitze Stei the main water sources are snowmelt and rain. The exact amount of water in the mountain is one of the unknown factors,' says Hahlen. Since Earth's last ice age, rockfaces have been routinely dislodged from Alpine peaks as a result of natural movement. But in the past century, scientists have seen more rockfalls and avalanches. Glaciers and permafrost—the high-altitude frozen soil, rock, and sediment that acts like glue to hold the mountains together—are melting as a result of the warming temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. A view of a landslide in Brienz, three days apart, from November of last year. As the region warms, ice and frozen soil are melting and unsticking the glue that once held parts of the mountain together. Photograph by Gian Ehrenzeller, Keystone/AP (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Gian Ehrenzeller, Keystone/AP (Bottom) (Right) As this icy glue melts, it allows water to penetrate cracks in the mountain, build pressure, and eventually rupture, triggering more frequent and severe landslides, rockslides, rockfalls, and avalanches, especially after intense rain and snow, another hazard of warming temperatures. 'In the next few years and decades, we expect an increase in risk from permafrost rock,' says Felix Pfluger, chair of landslide research at the Technical University of Munich. While catastrophic rock and snow fall can go virtually unnoticed in the remote regions of Alaska, Siberia, or northern Canada, they're an existential threat to many Alpine communities. The landslide that covered Blatten isn't the first tragedy in the Alps from a rockfall. This past June, residents of the Swiss village of Brienz/Brinzauls evacuated for the fourth time in two years from a rockslide threat (after debris stopped just shy of the village in 2023). Eight hikers and ten homes in the valley of Bondo didn't survive a devastating landslide in 2017. Stoffel says he expects more chain-reaction disasters with bigger consequences in the Alps—rock avalanches overloading glacier ice and causing it to liquify and slide down the slope, like in Blatten. His research shows 'a clear tendency for such [catastrophic chain-reaction] events to become more frequent in a warming world,' he says. '...especially after heavy rain.' A view of Kandersteg, Switzerland in October, 2023. While the region is being closely monitored, it remains safe. Photograph by Noemie Vieillard, Hans Lucas/Redux 'If you ask the older people in the village, they'll tell you there was always falling debris,' says Kandersteg's Mayor Maeder René-François. Growing up in Kandersteg, he remembers poking a pole into the cracks between ice and snow to search for bodies after an avalanche took out half a hotel in high season. There's a long history of rockfall and landslides, he says, as recent as 2023 and even this past May five died here in an avalanche. 'With climate change, it's happening faster. It rains harder, the days are hotter, and the fog sets in thicker over the mountain,' he says. 'But people here are not scared, it's life in the mountains. They respect that they must act in the correct way and follow the evacuation plan.' Since 2021, Kandersteg has enforced a ban on all new construction to minimize potential damage in the village district, closed a section of town, and built dams to reroute lake water. 'Big disasters normally start smaller. Instabilities with rock fall over a certain time start with cracks opening. A mountain doesn't just disappear out of the blue. There are always precursor signs,' says Stoffel. 'And if you take them seriously and observe the changes continuously, then, then you may not be able to protect the buildings or the village, but you can save lives.' While no one knows exactly when or what section of Spitze Stei will start sliding down the mountain, when it starts to crumble, residents and tourists should have at least 24 to 48 hours to evacuate. On a warm mid-June day, I followed tourists with hiking packs and poles to a mountain chalet built in 1880 and pulled up a lunch chair under an apple-red umbrella that matched a nearby Swiss flag and took in the brilliant turquoise of Lake Oeschinen–glistening and undisturbed by falling rocks, for now. Swimmers and paddlers snap selfies; a bride and groom pose by cows grazing near a roped-off section of the beach—their bells clanging measure with the chirping birds. 'None of them know they're right under it,' my server, David Brunoldi, told me when I asked him which rock is Spitze Stei. He points to the 9,800-foot frosty peak above us. 'More rocks are coming down every day.' Brunoldi says mountain people stay in Kandersteg for generations because it's home. On this picture-perfect, rugged Alpine terrain, where rockfall has always been a risk, his grandfather worked and died on a mountain train. Last year alone, an increasing 2.8 million cubic feet of rock crumbled down into the lake. 'No need to worry though, Brunoldi adds. 'It's not falling today.'
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The new LACMA is sleek, splotchy, powerful, jarring, monotonous, appealing and absurd
Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings' raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn't open until April 2026. Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard. Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer's fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn's refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil's Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still's rugged painting motifs. Zumthor's Geffen doesn't come close. I've written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design's negative impact on the museum program, but that's now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.'s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda. Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now. I've pretty much avoided consideration of the building's aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to 'The Presence of the Past,' a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor's still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool's errand when you can't experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens. A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there's a reason they're called shows — and chances are you've never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it's sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' meets Beckett's theater of the absurd. Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem. Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum's construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell's was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear. The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below. Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive. Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh. Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be 'a concrete sculpture,' which is why it's being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it's true, it's the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture. That's odd, because we've also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between 'upstairs/downstairs,' confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant. LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won't regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian. Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won't be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum's priority. An urban environment with a talented architect's unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that's a description of Frank Gehry's incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons' marvelous floral 'Puppy' sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture's control over nature; Koons' 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too. The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons' floral behemoth, 'Split-Rocker,' a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur's head with the hobby horse's head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history's triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.'s eye-grabbing building won't be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice? As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn't be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket. It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world's largest travel and tourism sector, but it's the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics. It's also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA's lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week. Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let's hope they don't know something we also don't know.
Boston Globe
4 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Private jets polluted more than all flights from Heathrow combined, study finds
Advertisement The study spotlights the outsize impact of the United States on emissions. Globally, private jets emitted up to 19.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023: Aircraft departing from the United States accounted for 65 percent of global private jet flights, and 55 percent of those gas emissions. That year, private jets polluted more than the total of all commercial flights departing from London's Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest hub. Researchers identified 22,749 private jets by unique tail number that operated over 3.57 million flights. The analysis is the first effort to combine flight trajectory information with publicly available emissions models to allocate private jet activity to specific airports. The study also modeled air pollution, meaning it considered not only greenhouse gases, but also nitrogen oxide pollution and fine particulate matter - both associated with significant human health risks. Researchers found that 18 of the 20 most polluting airports for private jet use are in the United States. And the majority of these flights are short-haul trips, lasting under two hours. Advertisement 'If you look at individual airports that are polluted from private jets, Van Nuys Airport [in Los Angeles] popped out,' Rutherford said. 'This is getting a lot of visibility because it's where the celebrities and influencers are all parking their planes.' Short-haul flights, defined as covering distances less than around 930 miles, account for roughly a third of aviation's annual carbon output. Airplanes burn a significant amount of fuel when taking off and climbing to altitude, making these trips less efficient than longer ones. France imposed a ban on short-haul domestic flights in 2023, but because it was limited to trips within its borders, analysts described the policy's impact as modest. Private jets generate between five and 14 times more greenhouse emissions per passenger than commercial planes, according to the European clean transportation nonprofit group Transport & Environment, and 50 times more emissions than trains traveling that same distance. While private jets often show up in large numbers in big events, from the World Economic Forum at the Swiss resort of Davos to the Super Bowl, the United States still ranks higher than other wealthy countries. The new data shows 687 private jet flights per 10,000 people in the United States, compared to just 117 in the United Kingdom and 107 in France. Florida and Texas alone generated 543,815 flights - more than the entire European Union. 'With smaller, private aircrafts, you don't have as many passengers to distribute the emissions across, so you lose some economies of scale,' said Colin Murphy, associate director of the Energy Futures Research Program at the UC-Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, who was not involved in the study. Advertisement 'We have a lot of millionaires and billionaires,' Rutherford said. 'We're a highly unequal society, and so that generates a lot of traffic.' This week dozens of private jets are expected to arrive in Venice for Jeff Bezos's wedding. (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.) Policy efforts to cut down on emissions from private aviation have largely fallen short. Legislation introduced in 2023 would have raised the federal fuel tax on private planes nearly ninefold, from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon, but the bill never came to a vote. At the same time, a Federal Aviation Administration program implemented last year allows some owners to remove their flight data from public distribution, making it more difficult to track private aircraft. 'The very important insight is that the global growth in emissions is coming from the top, from more people entering the very affluent classes that can afford private aviation,' said Stefan Gössling, professor of Tourism Research at Linnaeus University and Human Ecology at Lund University, who was not involved in the study. 'That is a trend that is quite powerful and ongoing and will mean that we will not be able to meet our climate goals simply because there's so much growth in the system that we cannot compensate.' Still, researchers say that the data offers a stark picture of an elite mode of travel with an outsize climate footprint - one that has increased its emissions by 25 percent over the past decade. Advertisement 'Private jets are like the canary in the coal mine here for a hyper unequal warming world,' Rutherford said.
Time of India
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
CM orders top security, cleanliness for Prez visit
1 2 Lucknow: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday reviewed the preparations for President Droupadi Murmu's upcoming visit to Gorakhpur, where she will inaugurate the state's first AYUSH University, named after Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath, in Pipri, Bhathat area on July 1. He directed the senior officials to ensure exceptional arrangements in terms of security, convenience, and cleanliness for the President's visit, so that the event becomes an unforgettable memory for Her Excellency. The chief minister conducted an aerial survey, carried out an on-site inspection, and chaired a review meeting. He was briefed on the preparations by the university's vice chancellor and other senior officials. The chief minister suggested that 'Uttar Pradesh' should be included in the university's name, given its significance as a major project for the state. He then inspected the arrangements along the President's route within the AYUSH University campus, including the site for sapling plantation, the Swiss cottage, main stage, and audience gallery. He issued instructions regarding security, cleanliness, and public convenience. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Get Affordable Health Coverage Today Search7 Learn More Undo He also directed the vice-chancellor and administrative officials to prepare a model of the AYUSH University for the President's review, showcasing the academic buildings, OPD, IPD, OT, Panchakarma centre, and other special features of the institution. After the inspection, the chief minister chaired a meeting with senior officials, emphasising that security arrangements must be of the highest standard.
Time of India
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Prez Murmu to open newly built 1st AYUSH University on July 1
: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday conducted an extensive review of preparations at the Mahayogi Guru Gorakhnath AYUSH University in Pipri, Bhathat, ahead of President Droupadi Murmu's scheduled visit on July 1. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The President is set to inaugurate the newly built state AYUSH University, the first-of-its-kind in Uttar Pradesh. CM Yogi carried out an aerial survey of the campus before conducting a detailed ground inspection and chairing a review meeting with senior officials. Emphasizing the importance of the occasion, the CM directed officials to ensure top-notch arrangements for security, sanitation, and public convenience. "Let the event be so memorable that it remains etched in the President's memories," he said. CM Yogi closely examined key areas including the helipad, main stage, Swiss cottages/safe houses, audience enclosures, plantation site, and the President's convoy route. He also asked officials to create a model layout of the university highlighting academic buildings, OPD/IPD blocks, and OT units. During the review meeting held at the university guest house, the chief minister reiterated that there should be zero tolerance for lapses in security. He stressed maintaining cleanliness across the entire campus, warning that any negligence would be met with strict accountability. To ensure smooth arrangements for attendees, he instructed that adequate drinking water, sanitation facilities, and parking spaces be provided. CM Yogi also proposed that the President be invited to plant a herbal sapling as part of the ceremony. The President will also inaugurate multiple academic and healthcare facilities at Mahayogi Gorakhnath University, Gorakhpur (MGUG). Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Murmu will inaugurate the university's new academic block, a state-of-the-art auditorium with a seating capacity of 1,500, and a world-class Panchakarma wellness centre featuring 11 cottages. She will also lay the foundation stone for a 1,000-bed girl's hostel on the occasion. Established in 2021 and inaugurated by then-President Ram Nath Kovind, MGUG has rapidly emerged as a model of modern, employment-oriented education rooted in Indian knowledge systems. Vice-Chancellor Surinder Singh said that all the courses offered at the university are designed to be employment-generating and research-driven, aligned with the goals of the National Education Policy. Registrar Pradeep Kumar Rao highlighted the ideological foundation of the university, inspired by the vision of Mahant Digvijaynath and Mahant Avaidyanath, who believed education to be the key to self-reliance and social progress. Chancellor Yogi Adityanath envisions transforming Gorakhpur into a 'Knowledge City' by 2032, with MGUG playing a pivotal role in this transformation.
