2025 Blatten glacier collapse

The Blatten Landslide was a natural disaster that occurred on May 28, 2025, devastating the village of Blatten in the Lötschental valley in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. A glacier collapse in the Bietschhorn region caused a landslide which buried and destroyed large parts of the village. The main village had been evacuated since 19 May 2025. The village was largely destroyed by a debris flow and ice avalanche. A 64-year-old shepherd, who was outside the evacuation zone, died in the disaster. The event was preceded by several rockfalls and landslides from the Bietschhorn area onto the Birch Glacier, which ultimately collapsed under the additional burden of millions of cubic meters of debris.

The failure was preceded by progressive seismic precursors, which were detected through unsupervised machine learning analysis of seismic data.

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