Mountains are collapsing: A Swiss mountain peak fell apart, sending 3.5 million cubic feet of rock into the valley below. Scientists warn climate change could make more mountains crumble.
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Mt. Fluchthorn's tallest peak collapsed earlier this year, and it's just one of many crumbling examples most likely to come within the next decade.

Mt. Fluchthorn’s tallest peak, on the Swiss-Austrian border, collapsed in June.

Experts say peaks in the European Alps and Southern Alps of New Zealand are at risk of collapse, too.

The damage and dangers from mountain collapse disproportionately impact indigenous communities.

On June 11, the main peak of Mt. Fluchthorn, on the border of Austria and Switzerland, collapsed without warning.

Roughly 3.5 million cubic feet of earth tumbled down, filling the valley below with 40 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of rocks, mud, and dirt, LiveScience reported. While no people got hurt, a religious cross marking the summit was destroyed.

Fluchthorn had three peaks, and the main, southern one used to be the tallest. With the south peak collapsed, the middle peak is the new summit at 11,145 feet — the second-highest summit in the Silvretta Alps.

Overall, Mt. Fluchthorn is 60 feet shorter than it was earlier this year, per LiveScience.

Why did the peak collapse? Well, like many mountains in the far north, Fluchthorn had a lot of permafrost — a permanent layer of ice and dirt under the mountain’s surface.

“Permafrost is important because frozen water within the ground holds the ground surface together and prevents it from moving. But when that ice melts, the liquid water can flow away. The ground surface becomes less stable and can move, often very quickly,” said Jasper Knight, a geoscientist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

When a big chunk of mountain moves quickly, like with the mudslide at Fluchthorn, that’s called a mass movement.

“Global warming is causing the permafrost to melt, which is the trigger for these mass movement events to take place,” Knight said.

  • @Zippy
    37•1 year ago

    Kind of interesting but movement of Earth equivalent to 40 Olympic swimming pools is rather miniscule when you compare that to a mountain peak much less a mountain.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      Landslides happen all the time, but one that actually reduce the mountain’s official height is actually pretty rare.

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 year ago

      It seems like that’s just what ended up in the valley. 40 Olympic swimming pools is only 100,000 m3, but the title says 3,5 million m3 fell in the rockslide.

      • Pons_Aelius
        10•1 year ago

        3.5 million cubic feet not meters.

        There are about 10 cubic feet in a m^3.

        So about 1/3 of the rock fall made it all the way into the valley.

    • FaceDeer
      -10•1 year ago

      Yeah, this seems like a stretch to connect a relatively minor rockslide to CLIMATE CHANGE! and INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES! Those hotbutton words get the clicks, though.

      • @SheeEttinEnglish
        20•1 year ago

        “Global warming is causing the permafrost to melt, which is the trigger for these mass movement events to take place,” Knight said.

        Across the world, mountains with permafrost melt have shown larger and more frequent landslides, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported. Research on rockfalls in the Alps suggests summer heat waves are a common trigger for melting permafrost.

        But warming temperatures due to climate change affect more than permafrost. The surface layer of ice and snow can melt, too, and cause flooding and mudslides. Melting glaciers can also cause mass movements, when mountains lose the ice that was propping up its sides for years on end, per the IPCC.

        That doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.

        • FaceDeer
          1•1 year ago

          The headline says “mountains are collapsing.” Mountains are not made of permafrost. Some of them have some permafrost in the soil on them, which is what sloughed off in this particular case, but calling that “mountains collapsing” is ridiculous.

          And really, glaciers prop up mountains?

          There are real, serious implications to climate change. Mountains collapsing is not one of them. And how they leap from there to “indigenous communities are disproportionately affected” is even weirder, why do indigenous people prefer to live on mountains? Who are the “indigenous people” in Switzerland anyway?

        • @Zippy
          0•1 year ago

          But how do you explain all the known rock slides far before global warming became an issue? Some far larger.