Army searches for missing man after glacier debris buries Swiss village

Wiler: The army was deployed and rescue specialists were airlifted in to search for a man still missing on Thursday after a huge chunk of glacier crashed down a mountain in Switzerland, burying much of a picturesque Swiss Alpine village.

Blatten had already been evacuated more than a week earlier when part of the mountain behind the Birch glacier began to crumble but a 64-year-old man was thought to have been in the area of the deluge of ice, mud and rock on Wednesday.

The debris has carved a grey gash into the wooded mountainside, stripping it bare of trees and leaving channels of water seeping over the mass of rock and earth below. A thin cloud of dust hung in the air over the Kleines Nesthorn mountain where the rockslide occurred and a helicopter buzzed overhead.

Experts were concerned that the debris was blocking a nearby river, causing a new lake to form and posing a flood risk on top of the rest of the devastation.

Three rescue specialists have been airlifted to the site, Swiss cantonal police and officials said. The army has also been deployed to the area to assist, they said.

Swiss officials were struggling to come to terms with the scale of the landslide, which officials said blanketed around 90% of the village.

"This is the worst we could imagine. This event leaves us shocked," Albert Roesti, the Swiss environment minister, said late on Wednesday at a press conference in the Valais canton, where the village is.

The incident has revived concern about the impact of rising temperatures on Alpine permafrost, even if environmental experts have so far been cautious about attributing the glacier's collapse to the effects of climate change.

The degeneration of part of the Birch glacier in the Loetschental valley occurred after sections of the mountain behind it began breaking off in the past few days, and ultimately brought down much of the ice mass with it.

Christian Huggel, a professor of environment and climate at the University of Zurich, said that various factors were at play in Blatten where it was known that permafrost had been affected by warmer temperatures in the Alps.

He added that the debris was damming up the Lonza river next to the village, saying this could pose a major challenge with up 1 million cubic meters of water accumulating there daily.