Climate Change Just Claimed a Swiss Village — And This is Only the Beginning

It’s not just mountains collapsing. It’s the day the taps start running dry.

The alpine village of Blatten, Switzerland, devoured by mountain debris (created by authors)

The mountain face begins to move, not in chunks or pieces, but as one amorphous mass dragging down the slope. But the slurry of picks up speed, gathering force with each meter, until the air itself seems to shudder. Then comes the sound of unraveling.

What follows isn’t a clean avalanche but a boiling, chaotic surge: rock grinding ice, ice grinding soil, frozen ground dissolving in seconds as an oddly shaped plume rises, not of mist or morning fog, but of pulverized earth. A towering wall of earth collapsing in real time, as if the Alps had just exhaled in pain.

And like ten mega-cruise ships stacked together, three million cubic meters of debris thunders down the gully, snapping trees like matchsticks, consuming homes and memories as it devours the village in the valley whole.

People called it an avalanche or a landslide. I call it the beginning.

Deeper Than the Moving Surface

On May 28, 2025, Blatten — nestled in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, between rock, glacier, and sky — was erased in the time it takes to read this sentence.