Swiss president vows aid after glacier destroys village

Описание: Swiss president vows aid after glacier destroys village

#breakingnews #switzerland #glacier #weather #climatechange #naturaldisaster

Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter said on Friday (May 30) that a small alpine village had been affected by an "indescribable" disaster when millions of cubic meters of ice, mud and rock crashed down onto it this week.

Most of the Swiss village of Blatten was seen submerged under water, mud and rock on Thursday.

It comes a day after a large chunk of a glacier came crashing down a mountain, engulfing some 90% of the village.

Blatten’s 300 residents had already been evacuated earlier in May after part of the mountain behind the Birch Glacier began to crumble.

Rescue teams have continued looking for a missing 64-year-old man, but have so far found nothing.

A spokesperson for local authorities said that buildings which had emerged intact from the landslide are now flooded and that some residents of neighboring villages had been evacuated as a precaution.

Some experts have warned of the risks of flooding as vast mounds of debris are clogging the path of the River Lonza, causing a huge lake to swell amid the wreckage.

MYLENE JACQUEMART: "The images are just really, really shocking."

Mylene Jacquemart is a glaciologist.

"Over the course of the past two weeks or so, there was a large rock instability that developed above the glacier. So there's a mountain and rocks started falling off the mountain and depositing on the glacier."

While Jacquemart cannot say for certain whether climate change was the underlying cause of this event, she said it's one of the main drivers behind big changes in the mountains.

"...what we know is that climate change of high elevations is not favorable for rock slope stability. So with increasing temperatures, more water available through ice and snowmelt, maybe precipitation falling, even high elevations more often as rain than as snow. So those are factors that are not beneficial to mountain stability."

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