The videos that emerged of the flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet last week are terrifying and unforgettable. The wall of brown water sweeping away everything in its path. The people fleeing before being overtaken by the torrent. The scenes are also striking for another reason: On the day of the flood, it wasn’t raining.
Geologists believe that a high-altitude landslide and glacial avalanche set off the flooding. Scientists are still working out the precise cause, and to what extent climate change played a role in destabilizing the terrain. But the risk of such events is only expected to increase. Today’s newsletter is about the growing hazards from melting mountains.
Terrifying and unpredictable destruction
Ziha Yitie, a tour guide, brought a group of hikers to a high-altitude observation deck in Tibet on Wednesday morning for a view of the snowcapped mountains over the border in Nepal.
As they took in the dramatic views, my colleagues report, the group began hearing a series of “deep rumbles.” Eventually they heard a loud crack that “sounded like explosives detonating inside the mountains,” as Ziha put it, followed by a wall of noise, then a cloud of dust.
What they were witnessing, though they didn’t know it at the time, was the beginning of a disaster that would, at latest count, kill at least 700 and leave more than 3,000 missing. A glacier was collapsing. Scientists are still working out the precise chain of events, but what started out as plummeting ice in the high Himalayas would go on to cut a path of destruction at least 80 kilometers long.
My colleague Anupreeta Das has been in Nepal covering the aftermath of the disaster. When I spoke to her, she painted a harrowing picture — of villages so thoroughly swept away that they were barely recognizable as former villages from the air; of large trucks tossed by the water and deposited at odd angles, as if by a careless toddler. Watch Anupreeta’s video below.
The government has estimated that the cost of rebuilding could be between $4 billion to $5 billion, she said. That’s approximately a tenth of Nepal’s economy.
Last week’s flood was exceptional. But it also reminded me of a story my colleagues wrote last fall that has stuck with me. The headline: “A Dead Glacier Is a Loss. A Dying One Is a Threat.”
When the waters came for Thame
Scientists have long worried about devastating flash floods in the Himalayas.
The ice that holds the land together is “wasting away,” my colleagues explain. “Glacier-draped slopes are going bare.”
This, their story goes on to explain, sets the stage for disaster.
The story focuses on what happened to a village called Thame, also located in northern Nepal, and the perils of the huge, unstable lakes that have formed near melting glaciers.
In August 2024, whole swaths of Thame were destroyed after rockfall landed in a remote lake above the village, where water from melting glaciers had been pooling. The rocks displaced an enormous amount of water, which then was sent cascading down the mountain, picking up speed and also sand, silt, gravel and boulders.
What happened in Thame and what unfolded last week were not precisely equivalent.
In Thame, a combination of falling rocks and accumulated water from melting glaciers led to the flood.
Last week’s disaster still needs to be studied, but it doesn’t appear to have involved meltwater. Instead, scientists are looking at what role the thawing permafrost might have played in the initial landslide and glacier collapse, and whether the glacier itself may have been pulverized into water by the force of the fall.
But should that hypothesis pan out, both disasters would be, at least in part, consequences of the slow, steady melting of the Himalayas.
Incredibly, no one in Thame died, though the village did lose its medical clinic and its school, as well as two dozen homes and trekking lodges.
This time, by contrast, our reporters are turning up stories about bodies being swept away as far as India, and a city where hundreds of bodies are washing ashore — so many that authorities are having trouble accommodating them so they can be identified.
An unlucky combination
Part of what makes events like these so scary is how difficult they are to predict.
Last week’s flood was the result of a sudden collapse in a hard-to-reach region. Anticipating something of that sort would require intensive and resource-heavy monitoring across a vast area, as my colleague Laura Chung reported. The lake that flooded Thame was small and so remote that nobody had bothered to give it a name.
But they’re not impossible to predict. The Himalayas are not the only mountain range dealing with melting and collapsing glaciers. But Nepal is facing the unlucky combination of few resources — it’s one of the world’s poorest countries — and particularly unforgiving geography. A glacier collapsed in Switzerland last spring, burying a village, but only one person died. The village was evacuated days earlier, at the behest of officials who were closely monitoring a glacier that had been showing signs of trouble.
Nepal is also a country that has contributed relatively little to climate change and is now struggling to cope with its worst effects. A geologist writing in The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter on Friday called the melting glaciers in the Himalayas ticking time bombs; there are many more set to go off.
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The most clicked link in your newsletter Friday was about the scale of destruction in Nepal.
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That’s it for today. See you next time! — Alicia
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