The frightening collapse of a glacier in Switzerland which overwhelms an entire village (which had already been evacuated)

Down, with a crazy roar, up to bury under millions of cubic meters of ice and debris an entire village: it is the glacier Birchin the Canton of Valais, which in the last few hours has detached himself from the mountain and has fallen downstream overwhelming everything. Fortunately, the village of Blatten just below had been evacuated in advance, precisely because of the imminent avalanche risk.

And in fact the experts had foreseen the event: Wednesday 28 May a large portion of the Birchggletscher detached himself from the mountain, causing a roar throughout the valley, electric blackout and a movement of the earth recorded by seismographers as an earthquake of magnitude 3.1.

The landslide covered the valley floor with a layer of material several tens of meters high and the course of the Lonza river was also obstructed by the tall several meters high. However, at the moment there are no injuries.

The village, where just under 500 people lived, was in fact evacuated a couple of weeks ago, when a first crumbling occurred above the Birch glacier. In the following days the mass of rocky debris, around 9 million tons, had triggered the movement downstream of the collapsed glacier now.

The collapse of the Birch glacier – concludes Giorgio Zampetti, general manager of Legambiente – represents an alarm bell for all Alpine territories and strongly recalls the urgency of strengthening mitigation and adaptation policies to the climatic crisis in mountain areas, but also in the territories downstream. To counteract a climatic crisis that runs fast and that knows no boundaries, urgent and immediate actions are needed and a European glacier governance with greater international cooperation between researchers, civil society and institutions together with information and awareness campaigns, To be accompanied by precious altitude monitoring that in the case of the Birch glacier have made it possible to take precautionary measures by evacuating the local population and cattle already on May 19. According to the latest scientific studies, central Europe, with Alps and Pyrenees, are heating up at a speed of about double compared to the rest of the world and phenomena such as glaciers’ mergers, landslides and debrical flows are increasing. For this reason it is urgent to intervene as soon as possible as the UN also reminds us in the international year of the glaciers and on which no more delays are admitted.