'Apocalyptic' Swiss village obliterated in two minutes by 9m tonnes of rock

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.

- Tess McClure

On Wednesday afternoon, in an instant, it gave way. The ice cracked, then crumbled. The entire mass descended into the 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 on Friday. "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 a mile 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, who is believed to have stayed in the area, is missing. As Blatten's people shelter in adjacent villages, gratitude for having escaped alive is mixed with grief at the enormous loss: of homes, businesses and history. "The people have lost everything, except for what they are currently carrying on their bodies," Bellwald said. The scale of the glacial landslide that hit Blatten is near unprecedented in the Swiss Alps. But glaciers and permafrost are melting and destabilising across the world. As they do, terrain that was once frozen solid is crumbling and sinking. Some glacial lakes are overflowing, and rivers of ice that have endured for millions of years are cracking, shrinking and being loaded with debris.