Around 3:30 pm (1330 GMT), a huge collapse occurred on the Birch Glacier, emergency services in the Wallis region said.

Many homes in Blatten, normally home to 300 people, were destroyed, Jonas Jeitziner, deputy information officer for the regional emergency management service, told Switzerland's Keystone-ATS domestic news agency.

The glacier collapse had been expected for several days.

Footage posted on YouTube showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountain slope and into the valley where the village is located. The debris reached the houses.

A significant increase in activity was observed on the glacier from Tuesday night and intensified during Wednesday.

The Alps mountain range in Europe has seen its glaciers retreat in recent years due to warming that most scientists attribute to climate change.

Swiss glaciers, severely impacted by climate change, melted as much in 2022 and 2023 as between 1960 and 1990, losing in total about 10 percent of their volume.

The amount of snow covering Switzerland's glaciers at the end of winter this year was 13 percent below the 2010-2020 average, a group of glacier monitoring experts said earlier in May.