  We report on the experimental characterization of energetic and dynamical
instability, two mechanisms responsible for the breakdown of Bloch waves in a
Bose-Einstein condensate interacting with a 1D optical lattice. A clear
separation of these two regimes is obtained performing measurements at
different temperatures of the atomic sample. The timescales of the two
processes have been determined by measuring the losses induced in the
condensate. A simple phenomenological model is introduced for energetic
instability while a full comparison is made between the experiment and the 3D
Gross-Pitaevskii theory that accounts for dynamical instability.
