{"id":117190,"date":"2026-08-19T01:55:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T01:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/117190\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T01:55:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T01:55:54","slug":"a-swiss-glacier-collapses-and-largely-destroys-an-alpine-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/117190\/","title":{"rendered":"A Swiss glacier collapses and largely destroys an Alpine village"},"content":{"rendered":"

GENEVA (AP) \u2014 A huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a Swiss mountainside on Wednesday, sending plumes of dust skyward and coating with mud nearly all of an Alpine village that authorities had evacuated earlier this month as a precaution.<\/p>\n

Video on social media and Swiss TV showed the mudslide near Blatten, in the southern L\u00f6tschental valley, with homes and buildings partially submerged under a mass of brownish sludge. Regional police said a 64-year-old man was reported missing, and search and rescue operations involving a drone with thermal camera were under way.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I can tell you at the moment is that about 90% of the village is covered or destroyed, so it\u2019s a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,\u201d Stephane Ganzer, the head of security in the southern Valais region, told local TV channel Canal9.<\/p>\n

The regional government said in a statement that a large chunk of the Birch Glacier above the village had broken off, causing the landslide which also buried the nearby Lonza River bed, raising the possibility of dammed water flows.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a risk that the situation could get worse,\u201d Ganzer said, alluding to the blocked river.<\/p>\n

He said the army had been mobilized after earlier indications that the movement of the glacier was accelerating.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Areal<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

At a news conference, Swiss Environment Minister Albert R\u00f6sti lamented \u201can extraordinary event\u201d and said the government would take steps to help villagers who lost their homes.<\/p>\n

In recent days the authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people<\/a>, as well as all livestock, from the village amid fears that the 1.5 million cubic meter (52 million cubic feet) glacier was at risk of collapse.<\/p>\n

Local authorities were deploying by helicopter and across the area to assess the damage, Jonas Jeitziner, a spokesman for the L\u00f6tschental crisis center, told The Associated Press by phone.<\/p>\n

Swiss glaciologists have repeatedly expressed concerns about a thaw in recent years, attributed in large part to global warming, that has accelerated the retreat of glaciers in Switzerland.<\/p>\n

The landlocked Alpine country has the most glaciers of any country in Europe, and saw 4% of its total glacier volume disappear in 2023<\/a>. That was the second-biggest decline in a single year after a 6% drop in 2022.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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In 2023, residents of the village of Brienz, in eastern Switzerland, were evacuated before a huge mass of rock<\/a> slid down a mountainside, stopping just short of the community. Brienz was evacuated again last year<\/a> because of the threat of a further rockslide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GENEVA (AP) \u2014 A huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a Swiss mountainside…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[56990,50,5581,18944,197,46689,2783,16643,56991,56810,69,56992,17,5587,1046],"class_list":["post-117190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alps","tag-albert-rsti","tag-alps","tag-climate","tag-climate-and-environment","tag-europe","tag-evacuations","tag-general-news","tag-glaciers","tag-jonas-jeitziner","tag-landslides-and-mudslides","tag-politics","tag-stephane-ganzer","tag-switzerland","tag-switzerland-government","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117119692625905736","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}