How a tiny village was engulfed by a mountain

It took a couple of minutes for 9m tonnes of rock to obliterate Blatten-but as glaciers melt, such disasters are more likely

- Tess McClure

For weeks the weight had sat above the village, 9m tonnes of rock precariously resting on an ancient slab of ice.

A chunk of Kleines Nesthorn mountain’s peak had crumbled, and its rubble hung over the silent, empty streets of Blatten, held back only by the glacier. The ice groaned beneath the pressure.

Last Wednesday afternoon, in an instant, it gave way. The ice cracked, then crumbled. The entire mass descended into the Swiss valley below, obliterating the village that had existed there for more than 800 years.

“Blatten has been wiped away. Erased, obliterated, destroyed, stamped into the ground,” the village’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said. “The memories preserved in countless books, photo albums, documentation - everything is gone. In short, this is ground zero for Blatten.”

Looking down from the slope above where the village once lay, you can still see the peaks of a few houses, piercing the mud. The valley is a lush sweep of green, pricked with wildflowers that have thrived in Switzerland’s unusually long, warm spring. But its pasture is now bisected by an enormous brown-grey mass of dirt, ice and rock dozens of metres thick and more than 1.5km long. The avalanche hit the valley with such force it washed up the other side, like a wave in a bathtub.

Almost all of the 300 residents had been evacuated a week earlier after authorities grew concerned. One 64-year-old man, believed to have stayed in the area, was still missing early this week.