Tag: Climate change

In mid-May, at about ten thousand feet above sea level, a rocky mountainside in the Swiss Alps gave way and tumbled onto a field of ice called the Birch Glacier. Half a mile below, in the Lötschen Valley, lay Blatten, a picturesque village of centuries-old wooden houses. The following night, Blatten’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, heard crashing noises from the mountain. He quickly arranged for a helicopter to fly him and a local official who monitored natural hazards up to the site. Although the mountain, the Kleine Nesthorn, was still covered with snow, they could tell that something deeply unnatural was happening. “I saw that, on the mountain, cracks had formed,” the Mayor told me. “At first, it was just one, then several more.”

Since the nineties, the Birch Glacier, which covered an area of about fourteen city blocks, had been behaving strangely. Unlike many Alpine glaciers, which have receded as the planet warms, it had advanced down the slope, probably because of periodic rockfalls that weighed it down. As a result, Swiss authorities kept the section under constant surveillance. On Saturday, May 17th, after sensors detected more instability, the village government ordered the evacuation of what is known as the shadow side of the village, which is closest to the Kleine Nesthorn. Lukas Kalbermatten, the owner of a local hotel, told me that some village residents moved from their homes and into his property.

Soon, a crack, which was perhaps several feet wide and a hundred feet deep, was spotted between the Kleine Nesthorn and the mountain range it was a part of—suggesting that the peak itself was unstable. “The whole mountain was moving,” Kalbermatten told me. By Monday morning, experts from the canton of Valais, which encompasses Blatten, estimated that up to three million cubic metres of debris could rush down the mountain, over a nearby dam, and into the village. This time, all of Blatten’s three hundred residents, including Kalbermatten, were required to leave within twenty minutes. Officials counted them individually as they left.

By Monday evening, one flank of the Kleine Nesthorn had collapsed in on itself, sending more debris onto the glacier. Kalbermatten spent this period helping his employees find places to stay; he was optimistic that they’d be back to work soon. On May 28th, having little to do—his hotel was empty and inaccessible—he and a former colleague went up to an observation point just across the valley, where they’d have a good view of the glacier. In the hour and a half that Kalbermatten spent up there, rain started to fall. Then he saw the glacier and the mountainside begin to move. In a video that he shot, what looks like a wave of ice and stone slowly flows down from the snowy peak. A voice briefly cries out with shock, then falls silent. The slurry of glacier and debris picks up speed; by the time it reaches the treeline, farther down the slope, it has billowed into a cloud that resembles a volcanic eruption or an explosive demolition. After that, Kalbermatten stopped filming. He didn’t want to record the moment that his home town was erased. “We all knew,” he said. “It was too late.”

A local farmer, Toni Rieder, witnessed the disaster from his car, about a mile from Blatten. “I heard the crash, the blast wave,” he told me. The wreckage from the village was thrown high into the air, he said; the energy of the landslide appeared to vaporize chunks of ice into a cloud of mist. One of his friends was tending to sheep nearby—outside the evacuation zone, but inside the area that was struck. “The first thing I knew was that he was gone,” Rieder said. “It was impossible for someone to survive.”

The landslide contained an estimated nine million cubic metres of material—three times what officials had expected. It was so large that, after it reached the valley floor, it flowed up the opposite slope before sloshing back down again. The avalanche temporarily dammed the Lonza River, which runs through Blatten, and small lakes, filled with dead trees and detritus from homes, formed on each side of the village. About ninety per cent of Blatten, including Kalbermatten’s hotel, was destroyed. High above the village, the Birch Glacier was gone.

The Lonza River is normally an icy blue, but when I first saw it, on a sunny day in June, it was brown from the debris upstream. I caught a bus to Blatten from the entrance to the Lötschen Valley, where the Lonza flows into the Rhône. We drove up a series of steep switchbacks until Alpine peaks, still decked in snow, towered above us. Then the bus rounded a corner and the landslide came into view. A man in the bus stood up and, with a shocked look on his face, took a photograph with his phone. In the distance, a brown gash stretched from the mountaintops to the valley floor. Where it had cut through forest, no trees remained intact; all had been flattened or buried. Blatten now resembled a pit mine. Several rivulets flowed lazily through the debris.

I got off in Kippel, two villages before Blatten, and made my way to the town hall, which had become a staging area for the emergency response. Even at five thousand feet, the temperature was in the eighties. Upstairs, I met Mayor Bellwald, thin and tan in a red plaid shirt and hiking boots. He had occupied his position for only five months, and he looked drawn. Like everyone I interviewed in Blatten, he referred to the landslide as die Katastrophe.

Bellwald told me that, after the landslide, the first thing he felt was pain. “An entire village—history, tradition, houses, memories—simply gone in thirty seconds,” he said. His deep-set eyes peered at me through large glasses. “Then, straightaway, came the feeling that I am responsible for this community. What needs to be done now?” In the days that followed, scientists studied the slope to gauge the risk of more landslides. The national government called in the Army to secure the area. First responders searched for the missing shepherd; his remains were not recovered until weeks later. Bellwald barely saw his family. He mentioned a recent conversation with his godmother, who is in her nineties and lost a seven-century-old house. “We can’t undo it,” she’d told him. “Just get up once more than you fall down.”

Ultimately, hundreds of news outlets covered the destruction of Blatten. Experts called it unprecedented and warned that Alpine permafrost was thawing. Before-and-after photos went viral online. The media frenzy was so intense that, at one point, journalists were barred from entering the Kippel town hall. Meanwhile, Swiss newspapers debated whether Blatten should be abandoned. Beat Balzli, the editor-in-chief of the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, cautioned politicians not to fall into an “empathy trap” by promising to rebuild. “The retreat of civilization reduces the potential for damage,” he wrote. “Where there is less, less is destroyed.” His argument was a version of one that Americans encounter every year, whether after hurricanes in Florida or after fires in Southern California.

I expected to hear the same debate among locals. Instead, everyone who spoke to me seemed unified around a shared message. “We have lived here for a thousand years,” Bellwald told me. “A village will be built here again.” Funding began flowing to Blatten soon after the landslide. The Swiss legislature unanimously approved six million dollars in emergency aid; a charitable group, Swiss Solidarity, quickly secured another twenty-one million in donations. But by far the largest source of financing, nearly four hundred million dollars, will come from insurance companies, many of which are headquartered in Switzerland. (Property in all parts of the country—even areas that are at the highest risk of landslides, fire, and flooding—can be insured against disasters.)

Bellwald’s conviction about rebuilding was based in part on principle. “Everyone has the right to live where they live,” he said. He pointed out that cities, too, are increasingly prone to disasters. Yet most people in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York do not seem to be retreating from the hurricanes, fires, and sea-level rise that they face. Bellwald also argued that people from the mountains are best able to weigh the dangers there. “Nature lives in people here,” he said. Locals routinely stockpile supplies because they know that blizzards and avalanches threaten the roads. Each village employs a Naturgefahren-Beobachter, or observer of natural hazards, which was one of the reasons that Blatten was evacuated so swiftly. “The mountains have already made us pretty robust,” he said. He was not downplaying the risks of future disasters but making the case for adapting to them.

When I asked the Mayor about climate change, he seemed reluctant to talk about it. “I don’t think we should politicize these issues,” he told me. The scientists I consulted had a different attitude. None of them said that climate change could fully explain the catastrophe—the Kleine Nesthorn was inherently prone to rockfalls, and the immediate cause was gravity—but all were convinced that climate change had played a key role. Switzerland has warmed at a rate twice the global average. When water soaks into thawing permafrost and refreezes, it expands, causing cracks to spider through the landscape. The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment estimates that six to eight per cent of the country’s territory is unstable. “Ice is considered as the cement of the mountains,” a geoscientist told the news agency AFP shortly after the landslide. “Decreasing the quality of the cement decreases the stability of the mountain.”

“The more critical question is whether climate change was the main factor controlling the timing of the event,” Mylène Jacquemart, a glaciologist at the university ETH Zürich who studies natural hazards, told me, in an e-mail. If climate change sped up the collapse of the mountain, it could be responsible for the scale of the destruction. A decade from now, in a warmer world, “the glacier would likely have been gone, and the whole thing would have been much less catastrophic,” Jacquemart said. Bellwald tried to look at the long-term outlook in a positive light. “Everyone says that glaciers are melting,” he said. “And that glacier is gone now.”

One of the scientists I spoke with was a distant relative of the Mayor—Dr. Benjamin Bellwald, a clean-energy geologist at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, who spent much of his youth in Blatten. During his scientific training, he studied the glaciers of the Lötschen Valley. “Blatten was always like the anchor for me,” he told me. “Even now, when I close my eyes, I can go back there and navigate through all the small roads, through every corner of the village.” He first understood the scale of the destruction when his brother sent him a photograph. He couldn’t figure out which part of Blatten it depicted.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Bellwald made his first trip to Blatten since the landslide. On a hike through the affected area, childhood memories came back to him, and his eyes filled with tears. Still, he was relieved: almost everyone in the village had survived. He felt grateful that he’d grown up “surrounded by these peaks and glaciers, even if they destroyed what I loved most.” His trip ultimately reassured him that the area can be made safe to live in again, at least for those who are patient enough to wait. What is left of the Kleine Nesthorn is still crumbling, but the village could build dams to block small landslides. Although a remnant of the upper Birch Glacier still sits far above Blatten, it’s too high up for large quantities of rock to accumulate there.

At first, Dr. Bellwald couldn’t believe that, of all the places in the world where a disaster could strike, his village, during his lifetime, was destroyed. But over time he sensed that the catastrophe did not make Blatten an outlier. “Climate change will impact everybody,” he told me. Not every country can afford to monitor every glacier or rebuild entire villages. Still, he hoped that this landslide—one of the most closely studied in history—could serve as a case study. He felt a renewed sense of urgency, not only to stop climate change by phasing out fossil fuels but also to prepare for its effects through monitoring and adaptation. “Solidarity is key,” he said, adding that we must “be empathic with all of the people on the planet.”

During my trip, I hiked as close to Blatten as I could without crossing a perimeter that the Swiss Army had established. Whenever I looked up to admire the grandeur of the mountains, my eyes would be drawn back to the scar on the landscape. A faint haze, thrown up by smaller and more recent rockfalls, hung over the site. I kept thinking of the word “sublime,” which eighteenth-century philosophers associated with the might of nature and the feeling of mortal terror.