Today Russian television broadcast new scenes of devastation from the landslide, which began when roughly one-third of the Maili glacier -- three million tons of ice, by one estimate -- split from a Caucasus peak and plowed 10 miles down a mountain gorge.

Videotape showed rescuers hacking with hand tools at huge ice blocks, and towns inundated by floods from melting ice and debris-blocked streams. An official of the federal emergencies ministry said the tongue of black mud and ice averaged 17 to 33 feet deep and 175 feet wide.

''It's a very complicated situation,'' the official said in an interview. ''The 468 rescuers, both local and brought from Moscow, have everything necessary and are doing their utmost.''

For Russia, this has been a summer to forget. About 70 people, many of them children, died in May after rebels bombed a military parade in Dagestan, also in southern Russia. Another 154 Russians -- again, many of them young -- died in a midair collision over Germany in July. And 119 perished last month after a grossly overloaded military helicopter crashed in Chechnya, apparently after being hit by a rebel missile.

Scientists speculated today that global warming might have set off this latest and most bizarre of the tragedies. But Russia's ceaseless conspiracy mill quickly produced speculation that Chechen militants had split the glacier apart -- or that the film crew had caused the disaster by using explosives during filming.

In fact, the film was being shot thousands of feet below the glaciers. The ice and debris tumbled through a spot above the village of Karmadon where the crew had been packing equipment for transport.

If Mr. Bodrov was swept up in the landslide, Russia will have lost its most celebrated and versatile young actor, albeit not -- in some critics' view -- its most skillful. The son of an eminent Russian film director who now lives in the United States, Mr. Bodrov got his start on Russian television, as a talk show host, in the early 1990's.