Last Wednesday in Switzerland, the Birch Glacier collapsed1 under debris deposited from Kleines Nesthorn and buried parts of the (previously evacuated) village Blatten.
Swisstopo has carried out a Rapid Mapping campaign2 on behalf of the Federal Office of the Environment. The resulting geodata is openly available from Swisstopo. Thanks to the open nature of the Rapid Mapping data and the expertise of individuals, textured 3D models of the affected area have been quickly built and published:
Alexandre Cottier has published visualizations of a pre-event and a post-event 3D model
Similarly, Florian Denzinger has created “during [his] lunch break” animations of a pre-event 3D model of the Birch Glacier. The model can also be explored interactively on Sketchfab. Florian Denzinger has followed up with an animated view of a post-event model (I couldn’t find an interactive version of this model).
Simeon Schmauß has also created an annotated post-event 3D model from the Swisstopo Rapid Mapping data (see below). This one can be explored interactively on Sketchfab.
On Sunday afternoon, Simeon Schmauß has also published a comparison of pre-event elevations with the post-event DEM extracted from the oblique Rapid Mapping imagery (see below). He’s also made the data available.
Footnotes
The ETH Zurich has a concise and informative brief about the event as well as a factsheet (pdf) from a glaciology perspective.↩︎
Rapid Mapping is a federal government service that collects and makes available aerial or satellite imagery following natural disasters in order to document and manage such events.↩︎