The Mountain Is Coming and We Must Go

For many who feel the call of the mountains, living amongst the Alps in Switzerland might be Edenic.

If you lived in Blatten, one of four tiny villages in the Lötschental, a valley in the Bernese Alps, you could wake up every day to see these views of jagged, 12,000-foot peaks soaring above cozy chalets.

Despite Gaia’s inherent beauty, nature is a force on a scale humans have difficulty comprehending, and, sometimes, beauty can be unimaginably destructive.

The more risk-averse might look at a satellite view of Blatten and see disaster in the making:

Wouldn’t this location be prone to perilous rock slides and avalanches?

Blatten looks tiny and vulnerable from this viewpoint.

Despite this initial, visceral judgment, the village has survived, in some estimations, since Roman times. According to the BBC, this fact is not the result of luck. Regular slides and avalanches tend to follow predictable courses and, over the centuries, residents created communities in safe spots. Additionally, as technology improved, modern Switzerland has been “extensively risk mapped.”

The result has been a relatively secure life for residents of the valley, despite a potential existential threat looming overhead.

But, for the people of Blatten, Switzerland, and other mountainous regions, the finest physical planning of the past could not account for a different threat: rising temperatures.

On the Alps above Blatten sits the Birch glacier. In addition to being a natural reservoir, the mass of ice also mitigates rockfall. The frozen, adhesive ice stew contains gargantuan chunks of boulders that would otherwise follow gravity’s pull toward the villages below. As temperatures on the planet continue to rise, the frosty glue loses its ability to lock up rock.

Scientists estimate that half the volume of glaciers in the Blatten area has melted in the past century.

In the middle parts of May 2025, unusual rock slides began in the Lötschental.

These slides were initially contained by the glacier, but, in just a few days, scientists noticed the ice river’s daily movement had increased substantially.

On May 24, the glacier was moving 15 feet per day, an incredible figure.

As rocks continued to fall, a pile formed on the ice. The heap hit a height of 250 feet on 25 May.

Two days later, the glacier was advancing over 30 feet per day!

Because Swiss geologists monitor the mountains so closely, the residents of Blatten were evacuated by May 19, even though they all hoped it was a precautionary move.

Unfortunately, on May 28, the move proved to be a monumentally good call.

In the nearby village of Kippel, several miles away, a couple told the BBC they were having their chimney replaced when loud sounds began to fill their ears and their electricity died. A worker came running, crying, “the mountain is coming!”

The glacier had collapsed, sending “billions of kilograms of debris” into the valley.

The imagery of this event verges on inconceivable.

Ten million cubic meters of rock poured into the Lötschental. The event registered as a magnitude 3.1 earthquake.

Ninety percent of Blatten was flattened.

The before-and-after photos are devastating.

Because government officials and residents had been so diligent with evacuations, no one has yet perished in this disaster, though one person remains missing.

Though they escaped alive, the residents of Blatten will likely need to forge new lives. Our technology stopped a human tragedy, but it cannot stop the onrushing new reality for places like the Lötschental. Will the other villages along the Lonza River face similar events in the future?

As ice continues to melt, all signs point to a dangerous answer.