Last week, rain poured into the already-drenched Emmental region of Switzerland. The water flowed over the saturated ground into the Emme River, which ruptured in torrential floods. It gets this bad only once every 300 years.
You can get a sense of the force at work in this video, which shows a tiny stream suddenly erupting in waters so strong that they easily push huge rocks downstream.
Of course, the appropriate reaction to an event like this is to go surfing, which is precisely what these two men did in the raging waters.
-via The Presurfer
That's ice. You can see it floating, on occasion. It gets very grubby in the muddy water you find on eroding mountainsides. The alps are young - so they're eroding fast.
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A few weeks ago, a beaver dam broke following 3.5" of rain, causing the creek behind our house to go from a trickle to 8' deep across a 25' span. Took out a road with a 5' culvert and moved a 6' rock downstream. Six weeks to fix the road, and the beavers weren't even sorry.
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