Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away.
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“The whole screen exploded,” he said.
Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below.
Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing.
But no one expected an event of this magnitude.
Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. “This one just left no moment to catch a breath,” Beutel said.
The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.
But it’s “likely climate change is involved,” he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It’s a problem affecting mountains across the planet.
People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks.
These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier.
“We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,” said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England.
