What if the glacier breaks?
And what if the glacier breaks and falls into the valley?
The small nesthorn above Blatten VS has so far fallen into smaller batches. The bay glacier stops the rubble. The question is: how long can he protect the village of Blatten?
Blatten is waiting for the mountain to fall off. The population is still evacuated, the little nest horn rebled. From a distance you can hear it, sometimes lumper, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. But you don’t see much. The weather has deteriorated in the Valais Lötschental since Tuesday, the mountain has been over.
« We don’t know much more than her, » says Alban Brigger from the Natural Round District on Wednesday afternoon in front of the media. The GPS sensor, which was placed in the rock, was carried along on Monday. Photos and exploration flights are hardly possible.
« So far satisfied » – but a problem child remains
Meanwhile, the numbers are corrected upwards: two million cubic meters of rock mass have crashed, said Brigger. The experts now appreciate the overall crashed rock mass for four to six million cubic meters.
So far everything has been going according to the desired scenario, says Brigger. The mountain falls, but only pieces. The birch glacier could do the pieces. And the village would be spared at least for the time being.
Alban Brigger, engineer of the Valais office for natural hazards, has so far « been as satisfied as you can be ».
« All of this mass then starts moving, » says Jacquemart. The additional weight could displace the water in and under the glacier. It is pressed between the ice and the rock and forms a broad layer of water there. The glacier could slide more easily on this.
How long stays blatks in the floating?
So far, those responsible in the Lötschental have repeatedly approached that afterwards to the clash could lead to smaller murgeon lengths and abrasions on the glacier. In itself, this is not worrying, says engineer Alban Brigger: « If a bit of ice breaks off on the glacier front, that’s no problem at all. »
However, if the glacier slides towards the valley under the new weight « en bloc », the equally serious consequences for the village could have. « These are large quantities of ice and rubble that can shift and, in the worst case, also become a large mural, » says Jacquemart.
Then the glacier would have slowed down the destruction, but not stopped. And the leaatt population would have to continue to fear. The situation for the village remains tense, says Jacquemart.
Glacier movement is worried
On Tuesday afternoon, the glacier front moved by about half a meter a day, says Brigger. On Wednesday, the speed rose to over 0.8 meters per day. Enough to worry.
And yet you don’t want to know anything about a longer evacuation. The first thing to do is to accompany the acute situation, says Alban Brigger. This could be worsened: by Thursday, the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research reports 20 to 40 centimeters of fresh snow. From 3000 meters of altitude, the institute reports considerable avalanche risk.
You will soon be expecting the remaining rock mass, said Brigger: « It will not take months. » The question of how the murgeon and the glacier continues will arise.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data132608305-d13032.jpg|https://images.nrc.nl/a7qunwvmw9uTBH0__HIuksj2e5o=/1920x/filters:no_upscale()/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data132608305-d13032.jpg|https://images.nrc.nl/Bl-Z8DVjKul-t8NNw3QQVfpFfAU=/5760x/filters:no_upscale()/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data132608305-d13032.jpg "Opinion | Social coherence is crucial in increasingly extreme weather")
