fOr weeks of weight have sat above the village, nine million tons of rocks unstable on an ancient ice. A piece of Kleines Nesthorn Mountain collapsed, rubble hung on the empty streets of calm and empty Blatten, blocked only by glaciers. Ice groaned under pressure.

On Wednesday afternoon, it gave way in an instant. The ice ruptures and then collapses. The entire masses landed in the valley below and destroyed the village that had been there for more than 800 years.

"Blatten was erased," village mayor Matthias Bellwald said Friday. "Memories are preserved in countless books, albums, documents - everything is gone. In short, this is ground zero for Blatten. ”

From the slope where the village once lay down, you can still see the peaks of several houses piercing the dirt. The valley is green and lush, with wild flowers scattered on it, thriving in Switzerland’s unusually long and warm spring. But now, its pasture is divided by huge brown gray soil, ice and rocks, with a thickness of dozens of meters and a length of about two kilometers. The avalanche hit the valley, and it flushed the other side like waves in the bathtub.

Almost all 300 residents were evacuated after authorities grew concerned about the stability of the mountain. A 64-year-old man is believed to live in the area and is missing. Gratefulness for escape with huge losses when the people of Blatten sheltered in neighboring villages: houses, businesses, history. "People have lost everything except the bodies they are currently carrying," Belwald said. "Houses, bridges, real estate - they no longer exist."

tIn the Swiss Alps, the scale of his glacier landslide is almost unprecedented. But glaciers and permafrost are melting and unstable around the world. As they did, the terrain of once frozen solids was collapsing and sinking. Some glacial lakes overflow, and millions of years of glaciers are rupturing, shrinking and full of debris. These mixed structures of earth and ice will be underperformed in a rapidly warming world. Those who collapse will emit a lot of water, rocks and ice downhill, thus eliminating everything on their path.

"What you're seeing is (which is happening). He's been keeping a loose eye on the birch glacier for weeks, and while working on Wednesday, he was live in the background - listening to its cracks and complaining.

As the noise increased, Beutel crashed in real time. "Suddenly, I saw pixels explode in the upper half of the screen. I was just in awe." The impact is similar to a bomb explosion. As the lens was covered by dust clouds, he searched the seismic data to estimate the size of the rock - and found it had been registered as a magnitude 3.1 earthquake, one of the largest Earth motions recorded in the history of the Swiss seismological service.

"It's certain that there will be more. There will be harm to infrastructure, livelihoods and interests," he said. "The same thing happened in all mountainous areas. Glacier areas are recovering. Over the years, there has been less snow ongoing, while permafrost warms around the world."

Stéphane Genoud, who lives in Anniviers, stopped between efforts to clear the property of the broken trees-their trunks were broken by an unusual, sporadic snow pile for a year. The Blatten disaster has only changed the latest and most dramatic changes in the lives of these valleys. "The changes are very fast," he said. "We have less and less snow, and the glaciers are retreating, consolidating the ice that is melting in the rocks. There are some routes in the mountains that are no longer accessible."

"It is obviously abnormal for the entire village to disappear under ice and rocks," Ginud said. "Imagine that your village is disappearing, in the carving history. No village. Within two minutes: the village is gone."

But he believes that as global heating accelerates, the collapse is part of the collapse. “Now, with climate change, the mountain will fall,” he said. “We are the canary in the coal mines – we feel the impact directly.”

eThese sudden catastrophic collapses are shocking for those who are spending monitoring the glaciers and their retreats. “I’ve been surprised by the massive collapse of glaciers and the detachment of glaciers in recent years,” said Andrew Mackintosh, a glacier scientist and professor of earth sciences at Monash University in Melbourne. “This is not what I expected, especially if the entire glacier fell off and then fell into the valley below.”

Often, the people living below are not as lucky as those of Breten, who are almost completely evacuated before they collapse. In 2002, Kolkata-Kolkata glaciers fell into the valley during the collapse of the Russian Caucasus Mountains, and more than 100 million cubic meters of ice and rocks fell into the valley, depositing 130 meters of debris. It completely buried the village of Nizhniy Karmadon and killed at least 120 people. In Italy, 11 people died from the collapse of part of the Mamorada glacier in 2022. In Kyrgyzstan the same year, a group of British tourists were swallowed up - but survived - a kind of avalanche-caused avalanche-caused glacier-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalanche-caused avalan

For Switzerland, a country used to manage major natural hazards in its mountainous areas, Bretten's destruction represents a new kind of destruction. When Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter returned from a helicopter flight to the loss on Friday afternoon, she said the sight was "apocalypse".

"It's actually balanced. There's always a landslide. But with these things, there's always something. Here, there's no more."

It is impossible to accurately attribute birch glacier collapse to climate change: even the attribution studies of extreme weather take weeks or months, and the landslide adds an additional set of complex factors to analyze. Recent reviews of 45 studies of landslides in the Alps found a clear link between heating climate and smaller rock landings or landslides, but there is not enough data to arguably for huge rock avalanches. Mackintosh said the exact attribution was almost next to it: the climate crisis has clearly destroyed the alpine environment and changed the entire ecosystem.

"The melting of permafrost - frozen ground bonded together from the top of a mountain literally - leads to unstable conditions in which the entire hillside can collapse under its own weight," Said Mackintosh said. In temperate glaciers, this could create a feedback loop: The rock blanket covering birch glaciers accelerates its melting. “These processes have led to catastrophic landslides of rock, ice and snow with devastating consequences.”

fThe tracks of the rom hiking tangle around the hills above Breten, and the scale of this destruction is obvious. There was nothing but a few crowned roofs. The valley was mostly silent, broken by birds singing, and the helicopters above the debris roared, watching any movement. Authorities say there is no time frame to visit the site: it is still too unstable. The ocean covering the rock is pierced by water tracks. When the landslide struck, it blocked the Lonza River through the valley, while regional authorities feared “if the river overflowed, it “flooded lava flow.” Now, the water has begun to eat up. In Kippel, just a few minutes’ drive from Blatten, locals gathered to watch the new brown flow blowing through the valley below.

Apart from town officials, Braden's evacuees have not spoken publicly about losing their town. “As you can imagine, it’s a very quiet, closed, introverted place,” said Brigitte Burgisser, who manages the meditation center in the neighboring Kippel. "Now, there is so sadness."

Living here the tiny, close-knit community hopes to rebuild. Mayor Bellwald said the valley without Braten was "unthinkable". But it is unclear when and when what they can do.

Belwald said that for now, the only village of Bratten that exists is invisible, and that is in the minds of the rest of the people. “We are very careful to use it as a memory.”