[Did you know ?] A Swiss village was buried under a mountain

[Zedd]

 

Last month, Lukas Kalbermatten-Ritler stood in a hamlet overlooking the small Swiss village of Blatten opposite the Birch Glacier, holding up his camera phone in disbelief.

“It was like a bomb went off,” says Kalbermatten-Ritler, who’s home and historic third-generation family-owned Hotel Edelweiss was destroyed on May 28. “There were black rocks coming like a wall over the glacier, like it was a big hand taking the village. This was the moment I stopped filming. I didn’t want to film when my village was falling.”

It took 28 seconds for the landslide from the collapse of the glacier to cover 600-year-old wooden homes in one of Switzerland's oldest and most picturesque valley villages in hard brown, cold sandpaper sludge that will be sinking for years. The collapse was so powerful it registered as a 3.1 magnitude earthquake.

It was a village that scientists never expected to see almost completely buried by 328 million cubic feet of falling rock and ice.

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