Aerial footage showed flooded homes and debris scattered around a Swiss village after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier crashed down a mountainside in the southern Lötschental valley. The landslide on Wednesday sent plumes of dust skyward and coated with mud nearly all of an Alpine village that authorities had evacuated earlier this month as a precaution.

There are strong theories on the causes, and to what degree it is linked to climate change — but these are yet to be confirmed by scientific analysis.

A devastating landslide, triggered by the Birch Glacier collapse, buried Blatten, Switzerland, prompting evacuations but leaving one missing. The disaster, attributed to climate change and rapid glacial melt,