A few days ago, the detachment of a huge glacier in the Swiss Alps, almost entirely an idyllic village, Blaten, which existed in the Lekedal Valley for centuries.

Now, the Swiss authorities are worried that the artificial lake created in place of the village by the detachment of the Birk glacier may overflow and send tons of water to the following areas of the plain.

Huge pieces of ice, mud and rocks have cut the flow of the Londza River – passing through the Leptal Valley – into a 2 -kilometer piece, raising fears of large, devastating flood.

“There is a high risk of flooding the valley below,” said Antoine Zakond, a member of the Civil and Military Protection Service in Canton Vale, according to the Keystone-ATS agency.

Indeed, for precautionary reasons, 16 people were removed from two villages beneath the affected area.

According to Rafael Mayoraz, responsible for managing natural disasters of the canton, the accumulated rubble “look like a mountain and of course a small lake has been created that is becoming more and more.”

The detachment of the glacier had been predicted for days, as many rock landslides were observed on the mountain over the village.

Video posted on YouTube show a huge cloud of ice and rocks rolling from the mountain. The power and speed were so great that ice and rocks continued their course as the opposite slope.

The phenomenon was recorded by all the seismological stations of Switzerland.

According to Mayoraz, “3 million cubic meters of rocks suddenly fell on the glacier and dragged him down” in the valley.

The incident has revived concerns about the effects of increasing temperatures on the Alps of the Alps, although environmentalists so far are hesitant to perform the detachment of the glacier to climate change.

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