The Swiss village of Blatten was worn out in seconds. A glacier collapsed above the village on 28 Could, triggering a landslide. The 300 residents had been evacuated per week earlier, however a 64-year-old man who’s believed to have stayed is lacking.
Tess McClure, the Guardian’s commissioning editor for the Age of Extinction, reported on the aftermath.
“The Birch glacier, which sits above Blatten, is that this historical slab of ice,” she tells Helen Pidd. “It had been loaded up with rocks and particles from the mountain above and simply gave manner and crumbled.
“The thousands and thousands of tonnes of rock, huge chunks of ice, the entire mud and timber and particles that it had swept up alongside the way in which, all of that simply fell down the mountain on to Blatten village.”
It is going to take time for scientists to find out the position that the local weather disaster could have performed within the collapse, however Tess explains why international heating will make occasions like this extra widespread.
“What we will say is, principally, local weather change is affecting the entire components for a catastrophe like this. So we’re seeing glaciers all over the world soften at an unbelievable fee. They’re shrinking, they’re cracking, they’re rising extra unstable.
“We’re additionally seeing permafrost and ice, which in an setting like that is simply the glue that holds components of the earth, components of the mountain, is type of holding all of it collectively, that permafrost can also be melting.
“And we additionally know that local weather change, greater temperatures and mountains are linked, from scientific research, to greater charges of rockfall and better charges of that type of disintegration. So we will’t kind of say sure, the Birch glacier was local weather change and local weather change alone, however we will have a look at all of those elements, and all of them are associated to international heating.”
Assist the Guardian right this moment: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
