Is it really that surprising? Something rolling down one hill normally goes up about the same on the other side. Add a bit of randomness and it doesn’t seem implausible to me.
I think I need a break. I’m going to the cellar.
Before that, I will just highlight the level of confusion in media right now, there is almost not editorial filter for whatever is said tonight. I happened to click on this interview to a UNIL geomorphology professor who was unable to remember Bondo/Piz Cengalo and Brienz, both in Graubünden. The professor was honest, he was not prepared for the question. Any decent editor would have not made this interview public.
In the rest of media, the words I read and listen to are “unprecedented”, “not event like this in recent times”. In practical terms, a glacier collapse, a rock massif collapse or a fractured mountain collapse are not that different. Meanwhile, even public TV has a memory…I really need that red wine.
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But that’s exactly what they reported in the afternoon, that it did climb up on the other side.
Don’t know about how many meters though.
I saw some marbles going down and up in ramps in school, conservation of energy and all that. I finally understood it when I saw people in half pipes, either skateboarding, bmx or snowboarding.
So, yeah. Physics are cool and it somehow makes sense bceause conservation of energy. But, rocks going up a slope that takes 20, 25 or even 30 mins to walk up? My level of abstract thinking is not yet there. Low friction as a smooth plywood ramp when a mountain slope is not smooth at all?
Perhaps not the entire avalanche is made equal. Its early parts fill the crevices, probably smothing the path for the later parts of the avalanche. Not as smooth as a plywood ramp but perhaps much more smooth than the original terrain would have you expect. And the mixture of water (molten ice) with dust might create surprising gliding effects similar to those at play with snow avalanches.
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Tremors of 3.1 magnitude recorded as it happened.
Well, the very existence of the event proves it’s possible for it to happen. There must be an explanation, smart people will provide it in the following weeks/months.
This video from today’s morning (around 50s) shows how high the avalanche went up. It’s real. Anyway, I still cannot grasp it.
Aslo, TIS. There is plenty of data about the Birsch glacier for a detailed investigation
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20min has a sobering visualization:
And when they’re done the next landslide might loom. Or even while they’re at it.
It’s simply not worth doing.
So the new lake that is forming is apparently a risk for suddenly collapsing and flooding the entire valley including the villages downstream.
Since this was known for at least a while, I wonder if they could’ve laid a pipe beforehand all along the Lonza river so water could continue to flow through it once the landslide covers the river.
“It was quite an unpredictable event,” Mylène Jacquemart, researcher in glaciology at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich and at the Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL), told SWI swissinfo.ch after the first rockfall. “The changes in the rock either happened very quickly or there had already been movement for months or years and no one noticed.”
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Gives you some idea of the scale of what came down.
" What is the amount of scree that fell in Blatten?
Three million cubic metres of stones descended on Blatten (VS) on Wednesday at the same time as the glacier, said the head of the Valais Natural Hazards Service, Raphael Mayoraz, at a press conference. How much does that represent exactly? Here are some examples:
SBB transport wagons
To remove the scree, more than 36,360 SBB Cargo bulk freight wagons of the “Eanos” type would be needed. Taken end to end, this would result in a train with a length of about 560 kilometres. By comparison, Switzerland measures around 220 kilometres from north to south.
Switzerland
If the scree were evenly distributed over the surface of Switzerland, a layer 0.07 millimetres thick would be created that would cover the entire country. The layer would be a little thinner than a sheet of paper.
Lake
The volume of the landslide would fill Lake Oeschinen in the Bernese Oberland to 7.5%.
Villas
We could fill about 3570 villas, based on an average volume of 840 cubic meters for a single-family house in Switzerland.
Pools
We could fill 1200 Olympic swimming pools.
Moving boxes
If the rubble were put in 60-litre boxes, 50 million would be needed, or about 5.5 million for each inhabitant of Switzerland.
Bottles
If the rocks were packaged in 1.5-litre PET bottles, the result would be around 2 billion bottles, or more than 220 for every person in the country."
Yeah, but how many double-decker buses?
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The water level on the lake keeps rising. People in exposed areas in the valley bottom (close to river channel) in villages downstream of the landslide have been evacuated: Wiler, Kippel, Steg, Gampel.
Something unmentioned in the media is that between those villages, there’s Goppenstein, the south portal of the Lötschberg rail tunnel. No reason to panic, but the stakes are high, quite high.
EDIT: I’m an idiot. The exposed one is the 1913 Lötschberg tunnel, not the 2007 Lötschberg BASE tunnel. No worries, all good.
I’ve read the opposite in the news: Lonza is slowly finding it’s way through the landslide and that the level of water in the newly formed “lake” is decreasing.
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Rooting for Lonza
Impressive indeed and something most - incl. me - probably didn’t think of yet.
Still, they lost it when it came to how long it takes as only because the amount of trucks needed make up a lenth from Platten to Porto that was only an example to get the picture.
Porto I’m sure is not interested in Swiss Alp debris, so no need to drive it off that far.
It does make one wonder though, where would it be put? Can this stuff be used in the building industry?
Excellent question.
There’s probably no place to receive this material. Also, moving it it’s far from cheap. Why spend money in moving dirt around when people is homeless?
and there I am complaining about the recycling stuff piling up in my cellar. I could get it all into my tiny car easily if only I would stop procrastinating.
Superglue! All back up! Solving puzzles is great prevention re alzheimer.
Sorry, trying to think out of the box.