A huge landslide took place on Wednesday around 10:40 a.m. in the sector of the north face of the Aiguille du midi, on the side of the Frendo spur, one of the most classic routes on the face. There is even talk of a collapse because of the relatively large volume that fell, around 10,000 to 20,000 cubic meters, at about 3,500 meters above sea level. More fear than harm, according to the gendarmes of the PGHM of Chamonix who did not intervene on the spot since the sector where the landslide took place is not frequented.
“The cloud of dust completely covered the entire foot of the slope”
Mountaineers have witnessed this very impressive scene, these falling rocks and enormous plume of dust which descend the slope, between the Frendo spur and the Mallory route. “What is especially impressive, more than the volume, because ultimately events like this we have had a lot of in recent years across the Mont-Blanc massif, is the cloud of dust that has formed and that completely covered the entire foot of the slope, the entire Pélerins glacier, up to the area of the intermediate station of the Aiguille du Midi, at the Plan de l’Aiguille”, comment Ludovic Ravanel, geomorphologist, specialist in the evolution of high mountain environments (CNRS researcher attached to the Edytem Laboratory of the University of Savoie Mont-Blanc).
“The accumulation of heat waves continues to degrade the permafrost”
A collapse “relatively similar”, of several thousand cubic meters, also occurred this Wednesday on the side of the north face of the Aiguille Verte around 6:30 p.m., in an area where permafrost (soil whose temperature remains below 0°C for more than two consecutive years editor’s note) is the most affected by the heat wave of recent days. “It is an ice that is several thousand years old, we speak of ice concrete, ice cement, but this cement unfortunately tends to degrade more and more deeply, which explains the strong increase in the frequency events”explains the researcher.
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He did today 27 degrees above 2,000 meters. And for the past three days, there have indeed been dozens of events occurring in the Mont-Blanc massif and in general across the Alps, but in terms of volume, we remain “quite far from the records that we were able to experience at the end of the scorching summer of 2017 in the canton of Graubünden (Switzerland) with, for example, 3.1 million cubic meters, so here we are still very far from it, and fortunately “.
This Wednesday, mountain rescue also intervened to help a rope of two mountaineers in difficulty in the Grandes Jorasses sector. Their rope was severed by falling rocks.
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