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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Mountains are among the planet’s most beautiful places. They’re
also becoming the deadliest
By Laura Paddison, CNN
Updated:
7:00 AM EDT, Sat June 7, 2025
Source: CNN
Jan Beutel was half-watching a , a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps,
when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting
louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself
unable to look away.
“The whole screen exploded,” he said.
Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had
just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions
of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a
centuries-old village nestled in the valley below.
Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the
mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to
have stayed remains missing.
But no one expected an event of this magnitude.
Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on
the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate,
eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse
was sudden, violent and catastrophic. “This one just left no moment
to catch a breath,” Beutel said.
The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this
magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going
back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss
university ETH Zürich.
But it’s “likely climate change is involved,” he said, as warming
temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It’s a
problem affecting mountains across the planet.
People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic
beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around live in mountain
communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of
conquering peaks.
These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world
warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier.
“We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the
dangers are changing with climate change,” said David Petley, an
Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England.
Snowy and icy mountains are inherently sensitive to climate change.
Very high mountains are etched with fractures filled with ice —
called permafrost — which glues them together. As the permafrost
thaws, mountains can become destabilized. “We are seeing more large
rock slope collapses in many mountains as a result,” Petley told CNN.
Glaciers are also , especially in regions such as the Alps and the
Andes, which face the possibility of a glacier-free future. As these
rivers of ancient ice disappear, they expose mountain faces, causing
more rocks to fall.
There have been several big collapses in the Alps in recent years as
ice melts and permafrost thaws.
In July 2022, about 64,000 tons of water, rock and ice broke off from
the Marmolada Glacier in northern Italy after unusually hot weather
caused massive melting. The subsequent ice avalanche killed 11 people
hiking a popular trail.
In 2023, the peak of Fluchthorn, a mountain on the border between
Switzerland and Austria, collapsed as permafrost thawed, sending into
the valley below.
“This really seems to be something new. There seems to be a trend in
such big events in high mountain areas,” Huss said.
Melting glaciers can also form lakes, which can become so full that
they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down
mountainsides.
In 2023, a permafrost landslide caused a large glacial lake in Sikkim,
India, to break its banks, causing a catastrophic deluge that . Last
year, a caused destructive flooding in Juneau, Alaska — a now regular
occurrence for the city.
After two years in a row of destructive glacial flooding, Juneau is
scrambling to erect temporary flood barriers ahead of the next melting
season, the reported this week.
As well as melting ice, there’s another hazard destabilizing
mountains: rain.
Extreme precipitation is increasingly falling on mountains as rain
instead of snow, said Mohammed Ombadi, an assistant professor at the
University of Michigan College of Engineering. His research shows every
1 degree Celsius of global warming increases .
This pushes up the risks of flooding, landslides and soil erosion.
Northern Hemisphere mountains will become “hotspots” for extreme
rain, Ombadi said.
Heavy rainfall this month in Sikkim, a Himalayan state in northern
India, triggered a series of landslides, killing at least three people.
Images show carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees
obliterated.
Scientists do have tools to monitor mountains and warn communities.
“There are fantastic instruments that can predict quite accurately
when a rock mass (or) ice mass is going to come down,” Huss said. The
difficulty is knowing where to look when a landscape is constantly
changing in unpredictable ways.
“This is what climate change actually does… there are more new and
previously unrecognized situations,” Huss said.
These are particularly hard to deal with in developing countries, which
don’t have the resources for extensive monitoring.
Scientists say the only way to reduce the impact of the climate crisis
on mountains is to bring down global temperatures, but some changes are
already locked in.
“Even if we manage to stabilize the climate right now, (glaciers)
will continue to retreat significantly,” Huss said. Almost 40% of
the world’s glaciers are , according to a new study.
“We could have maybe avoided most of (the negative impacts) if we had
acted 50 years ago and brought down CO2 emissions. But we failed,”
Huss added.
The consequences are hitting as the numbers of people living in and
visiting mountains increases. “We’re just more exposed than we used
to be,” he said.
Ludovic Ravanel, an Alpine climber and geomorphologist who focuses on
mountains’ response to global warming, has a front line view of the
increasing dangers of these landscapes.
Mountains are the “most convincing” hotspots of climate change, he
told CNN. When he’s focused on the science, he keeps his emotions at
arm’s length. But as a father, and a mountaineer, it hits him.
“I see just how critical the situation is. And even then, we’re
only at the very beginning.”
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