Giant glacier collapses and wipes out part of Blatten village in Switzerland

A huge mass of rock and ice has destroyed part of a popular village in the Swiss Alps that was evacuated earlier this month.

A video on social media showed the rumbling mudslide near Blatten,in the southern Lotschental valley of Switzerland,with several cabins partially submerged.

In recent days,the authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people,as well as all livestock from the village,amid fears that a 1.5 million cubic metre glacier above the village was at risk of collapse.

Local authorities were deploying across the area to assess the damage and whether there had been any casualties,Jonas Jeitziner,a spokesman for the Lotschental crisis centre,said.

The retreat of the Alps’ glaciers has been well documented.

More than 500 glaciers have already vanished from Switzerland,and the government has warned that the remaining 1,500 will be gone by the end of the century if emissions are not curbed.

Homes have been buried in thick mud and sludge (Picture: AP)

The village had been evacuated days ago (Picture: AP)

It has led to so-called ‘last chance’ tourism,where visitors flock to see such natural wonders while they still can.

Yes,there has always been natural variation in the size of these frozen rivers.

But Switzerland’s glaciers suffered their second-worst melt rate in 2023 after record 2022 losses,shrinking their overall volume by 10% in the last two years,monitoring body GLAMOS said last September.

The ‘catastrophic’ figures meant they lost as much ice in two years as in the three decades before 1990.

Late last year,scientists warned that a glacier known as ‘the doomsday glacier’,which has the potential to cause sea levels to rise across the planet,could be on the verge of collapse.

The glacier had been moving for a while before the collapse (Picture: EPA)

The village was relatively untouched until this week (Picture: EPA)

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) used underwater robots to take new measurements of the Thwaites Glacier,which is the same size as Great Britain or Florida.

The data suggestsed that the glacier,along with much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,could be lost entirely by the 23rd century. 

Worryingly,if it collapses entirely,the experts say global sea levels would rise by two feet (65cm),plunging huge areas underwater. 

In 2023,residents of the village of Brienz,in eastern Switzerland,were evacuated before a huge mass of rock slid down a mountainside,stopping just short of the settlement.

Brienz was evacuated again last year because of the threat of a further rockslide.