Swiss Mountain Summit Collapses as Permafrost Thaws; No Injuries Reported in Rockfall

When a Swiss mountain's summit crumbled due to the thawing permafrost, it resulted in a massive rockfall that sliced off 60 feet of the mountain's height. Officials say it caused no injuries.

Rockfall: No Injuries

Over 3.5 million cubic feet of rock fell into the valley below when a portion of a Swiss mountain's peak crumbled. The catastrophe was probably caused by thawing permafrost, and scientists have cautioned that as climate change causes old frozen ground to deteriorate, more events are to be expected.

The incident happened on June 11, following a protracted stretch of extremely high temperatures across the nation. The almost 11,155-foot-tall Fluchthorn, a mountain in the Silvretta Alps on the border of Switzerland and Austria, abruptly collapsed.

Riccardo Mizio, a mountain rescuer, claimed that the demolition had destroyed half of the peak. He added that the summit cross, a Christian symbol that marks a mountain's pinnacle, was gone. Due to the Jamtalhütte area's current closure, no one was hurt by the rockfall, according to the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.

Fluchthorn, the Swiss Mountain That Lost Its Summit

Fluchthorn's main peak dropped by about 330 feet. It crashed to the ground in the Futschöl Valley, on the peak's western side. The Fluchthorn's middle peak, which has 11,145 feet of elevation, is now its highest point, making the mountain around 60 feet shorter than it once was.

The tallest collection of mountains in Switzerland, the Mischabel massif, contains Fluchthorn. All 11 of the summits in the group are higher than 13,123 feet, with the Dom being the tallest at 14,911 feet.

Thawing Permafrost

Permafrost, meaning permanently frozen ground, covers the majority of mountain summits in the Alps that are higher than 8,202 feet. Permafrost penetrates deeply into the fissures in the solid rock, holding them together. According to a study published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, without it, mountain sides can become unstable, resulting in landslides and rockfalls.

Climate change has a significant impact on permafrost because warm temperatures can cause ice in the fissures to unfreeze. Even though this typically occurs in the summer, when the permafrost layer tends to thaw for a brief period of time, the recent more frequent heat waves in the Alps are having an impact and causing the summer thaw to gradually deepen.

Permafrost thaw is anticipated to destabilize more rocks throughout the Alps as the earth warms, increasing the frequency of landslides and rockfalls. According to Jan-Christoph Otto, a University of Salzburg geologist, the deeper the thaw must have been, the bigger the event was in this case, and it was tremendous.

According to Otto, this mountain summit has likely been frozen for a very long time. The mountain summit failure at Fluchthorn is presumed to be the result of extremely high temperatures last summer or fall because climate change took longer to reach deeper layers of rock.

Experts warn that similar rockfall incidents are possible in a warming world, even if it is impossible to forecast which peak or slope might collapse next in the Alps. The Alps have permafrost in hundreds of mountains, according to Otto. More incidents like these are likely given the Alps' continued temperature rise, LiveScience reports.