Sometimes it can be very difficult to grasp climate change but one degree makes a big difference and the glaciers can show that difference. One degree is the difference between having glacier up there where we see it now or having it down halfway the valley.
GLACIAL COLLAPSE
Formed in the last ice age, these vast rivers of ice carved and shaped the landscapes around them. And through natural cycles of snowfall and melt water, they've sustained communities for centuries. But as global temperatures rise, glaciers around the world are melting faster than ever. It's a phenomenon that's been recorded since the early 1900s. In Switzerland alone, the Alps have lost around half their ice volume. There's no clearer marker of climate change. And as the balance shifts, the mountains themselves are becoming unstable.
1.25
With its snowcapped peaks and wooden chalets, this alpine region looks like a postcard. But this picture perfect scene was shattered in May 2025 when a landslide buried an entire village here. Glaciologist Daniel Ferinotti is leading a team of experts to collect crucial data in the wake of an event long thought to be exceptionally rare.If we'd been standing on this spot just a month or two ago, the view would have been very different. What was here before?
**This was one of the pretty untouched valleys in Switzerland. And there was the little village of Blaten, which is as picturesque as the villages get.**
And yet what we can see now looks like almost a gravel pit.
**Yes, you may well call it like that. So what we see is the rock ice deposit that generated from the very mountain that you see up there. This came down that way and because of the fluidity you can see on that side it went up and that's a 200 m elevation gain and then it basically splashed out on the two sides.**
2.40
We can see and hear a load of activity happening here. What's going on?
**Well, what the authorities are trying to do is to reestablish a connection to the village. This they literally managed as of yesterday. So, there is a road that is connecting the village again because what you need to understand is that when the rock ice mixture fell, it would dam the river that we see. And so this ended up flooding the part of the village that didn't got destroyed from the first event. So what's happening now with all those helicopters flying that is the military going in and trying to clean up the site. So you know there is oil spills, there is houses literally floating around in that lake and this needs to be kind of reestablished.**
It's hard to grasp the true extent of the landslide without seeing it for yourself. So, I joined Professor Ferinati in the air to get a clearer perspective.
3.40
From this height, you get a bird's eye view of how an entire village could be wiped off the map in a matter of seconds. And I'm lost for words seeing the devastation. [footage]
In early May 2025, monitoring teams detected increased movement on the slopes above the Bircher Glacia with repeated rockfalls scattering debris on the surface of the ice. By midMay, modeling suggested a large scale collapse could not be ruled out. So a precautionary evacuation of Blaten was ordered. 10 days later, the glacier gave way. [footage] Around 10 million cubic meters of rock and ice hurtled down the valley at speeds of up to 200 kmh. That's as fast as a racing car. It took just 40 seconds to reach the valley floor. The village of Blaten was destroyed and sadly a shepherd was killed trying to rescue his flock of sheep.
5.12
The evacuated residents still reeling from the loss of their homes gather here to see what remains. Luittgard Vein has lived in the valley for 30 years. Sfl
The delicate cleanup operation is expected to take years. with many buildings still submerged in flood water after the landslide damned the Lonza River.
**sfl**
We now head over 3,000 m upwards to see where and how it all started. [footage]
7.05
Well, that was quite an experience. Wow. You are. Gosh, man. Seeing the the devastation that that's caused. It's like trees were just like matchsticks. **So, we'll go down this way and then I following you across. That is quite an epic view. Yeah. Isn't it? What is it that we're looking at here?
**So, what you see is the position of the former glacier. You see the position of the former mountain. And you clearly see the path it took kind of down the valley. In the days before the collapse, measurements showed the glacier's movement had accelerated to around 10 m per day caused by an overload of rockfall debris. And can you hear the sound? Is that water? No, that's not water. Those are the constant rockfall that is still ongoing. And you can see the dust cloud, can you? So that's the rocks impacting. So what looks like smoke almost coming out of the top of the mountain or or mist is actually the result of rocks falling down.
So this is what was going on kind of for for almost a decade. You see a bit of more rocks coming down. You see them falling constantly as we stand. Oh yes, it's constant. That's really nothing too. It sounds like an explosion. There it goes. Oh no. Listen, my internal voice right now is saying everything about being here is not a good idea. And so that would have been what happens anyway. That rocks will constantly fall down here, but just not in the amount that happened when Blaten was covered. It's a combination.
So over years this was ongoing. Um but that ended up covering the glacier. So protecting it from sunlight, shielding it from melting and on top with all the weight that the rocks would put on it, they would squeeze it like a toothpaste. And then came the final kick, there was a slab pushing the glacier from the back and eventually everything went at once.
So what was happening is that because there was so much ice involved, when you throw it down a mountain, you have a lot of friction. So kind of you're doing this and as you would do with your hands kind of you're generating heat and so this heat ended up melting the ice and making the entire thing very liquid. If it would have been only rocks it would have been looking different. If it would have been only ice it would have been different. It's kind of it was the perfect storm.
Climate change is thawing the permafrost in the Alps, triggering more frequent rockflies, landslides, and a general destabilization of mountain slopes. While it's impossible to prevent such disasters in the short term, understanding exactly what happened is crucial to preparing for the future.
So, what is it that you and your team are actually doing here?
**So, it's not only me and my team. There's a lot of actors from the private sector, from the government side and also uh from the science part and what's ongoing is that there is a lot of monitoring still ongoing. So there is cameras which you can make out of there. Very simple to the peak. Exactly. Yeah. There is equipment further down. There's equipment on the other side of the valley. This is still monitoring the mountain. That has two reasons.
One is as you can see it is still active. So this is for safety reasons and in order to be able to trigger an alarm if necessary and the other is to learn as much as we possibly can from this event. It is estimated that this happens once every 300 years. So there isn't many chances to learn what we can learn from here.
The ultimate goal is well to make every other place safer. And this is now the snow and ice we are told. If you feel out to the right hand side, this is a glacier. This is covered by dust in front of us too. We say that again. in snow and ice. Yes. So what we see here is snow and ice. The red part that is snow that has survived the winter. It is now dust covered. Whereas the white part that is uh ice that has now come out from uh from underneath the snow.
Although devastating for the people who lost their homes just a few weeks after the collapse, it's essential for Professor Farenotti and the team to capitalize on this rare opportunity. There's basically three things we're going to do. One is geo electrics. Then there is Nicola. He will do geo technical tests. So I'm working on on large landslides at SLF in Davos VSSL Institute for Snow and avalanches and uh we have now a lot of large avalanches in the Alps where some rocks, some ice and some snow are involved but we don't have good models to represent them and to understand what could happen if the slope is stable or not for how long when is it going to fail and how far is it going to go.
For safety reasons, we aren't allowed to join the team on the debris, but we give Professor Farenati a camera to record their work. We will be doing we call it geometric measurements. So that's a manner by which you can determine the composition of the deposit. In a nutshell, the deposit has three layers. There is one layer in which the ice has melted out. So it's dry that's very solid. There is one layer which is left with the melt water in it and that is can envision that like a bit of a concrete that has not solidified so it can flow around and then there is a third layer in which the ice is still there and that's reasonably solid too.
And so the measurement we'll be doing is telling us where those layers stand. Over there will be electrode 48. 48. Yeah. And number one will be there. So yeah, electrodes are placed on the landslide surface, sending small electrical currents through the ground to measure voltage and map the electrical resistance.
This geo electric method makes it possible to survey large areas quickly and the results can be verified with geotechnical tests. So today we go with a long metallic pole around in the field. It's quite heavy. It's about 15 kilograms. And then we have a kind of hammer on top. One person is holding the pole. The other one is hammering down. And we count the number of times we have to hammer down until the pole enters the ground. And we do this at multiple intervals along the length of the pole and also multiple places on the deposit so that we understand better the special distribution of the soil characteristics and also along the depth of the pole how it's changing. These measurements allow scientists to see what lies beneath the surface, mapping the buried ice, water pathways, and how compact the debris is.
Since analyzing the data, the team has revealed that around 30% of the debris cone is made up of ice, some of which has already melted, but much will take years to disappear entirely. Dr. Nicola Uriker and his colleague Professor Joan Gum at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research known as SLF are using the data in another way. This information is very important for the runout models that we are doing. We we perform some models to better understand when the avalanche is going, how far is it going to go, which places can it reach. Modeling large landslides like this builds a clearer picture of how rock and ice behave as they descend a mountain helping areas at risk should a similar collapse happen elsewhere. The likelihood of which is increasing as the Alps warm. Up here to the left you see a snow patch. You see also what is called the burk shrunt. So this little crack that looks like. So that is a bit where the Asia detaches from the mountain as you wish. And you can make out by eye right there the snow that is very white. For people watching this listening in France, in Spain, in the UK, further a field in the world, why does what happens here in the Swiss Alps matter to them? Well, this is a representation to what is happening to the rest of the world too.
So, what we see here is the effect of climate change.
Climate change is kind of increasing the rockfall, is retreating the glaciers, it's making the forest migrate upwards, is killing biodiversity. Sometimes it can be very difficult to grasp climate change.
