The devastating flood that swept away homes and killed at least 359 people in the Himalayas won’t be the last, experts have told Metro.
A giant torrent of water, rocks and ice abruptly smashed through the border between Nepal and the Tibet region of China yesterday.
Footage shows people trying to escape before a wave of mud engulfed buildings within seconds at the Gyirong crossing.
After the flood left behind a 40-mile-long path of destruction, more than 1,000 people are still missing, including British tourists.
Simon Cook, an environmental scientist at the University of Dundee in Scotland, told Metro yesterday that his team’s preliminary analysis of satellite imagery indicates that an ice avalanche triggered the flooding.
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asked three other glaciologists, experts who study glaciers, to review the preliminary findings.
One thing they all agreed on is that as rare as these events are and will be for a while, climate change will increase the risk of them.
What caused the flood?
Dr Cai Ladd, from Swansea University’s geography department, agreed with Cook.
From what satellite images can tell experts so far, it seems a 2,000ft-wide chunk of ice broke off a glacier some 17,000ft high in the mountains at about 8.40am local time.
Dr Ladd says the chunk was dangling off the head of the very steep valley, with satellite images showing snow cover vanishing.
‘It’s possible that meltwater percolated beneath the glacier, lubricating it and triggering its collapse,’ he explains.
‘The ice which then fell over a kilometre into the valley would have released a lot of energy, melting it and causing the flash flood.’
The landslide shook the ground so severely that it registered as a 5.2-magnitude earthquake.
Could this happen again?
Ice-rock avalanches and glacial collapses can happen anywhere in the world where you find steep glaciated mountains.
But the Himalayas, the snow-topped mountain range in Asia, are a hot spot as they have been warming rapidly for years.
The Hindu Kush alone, which stretches from Afghanistan to Myanmar, has lost 89ft of ice thickness since 1975, experts said in March.
A report the following month found snow persistence is nearly 28% below normal, the lowest in over two decades.
As the mountains become more squishy and unstable, this increases the risk of more frequent and severe flash flooding caused by glacier collapse.
Dr Liam Taylor, a lecturer in geography at the University of Leeds, says ‘unhealthy glaciers are under new climate extremes’.
Permafrost – ground that has been frozen for years – is thawing, pushing glaciers into ‘sudden detachment-style events’.
‘These events are still extremely rare, but they are a growing risk to mountain communities that live in proximity to glaciers and there should be more attention given to these low-frequency, high-magnitude events that have the potential to cause shocking devastation as we’ve seen in Nepal,’ Dr Taylor adds.
Dr Taylor says that it can be hard to list out all the areas where ice-rock avalanches will become more common as the planet warms.
They’re still too rare and vary widely by location, with similar incidents also seen in the Alps, Alaska and South America in recent years.
What are some of the world's major glacier disasters?
- 1941: Peru, a glacial lake outburst flood devastated the city of Huaraz and killed 5,000 people.
- 1962: Peru, a slab of ice broke off Mount Huascarán and unleashed 10million cubic metres of rock, ice and snow, killing 4,000 people below.
- 1970: Peru, a powerful earthquake shook a chunk of glacier off Mount Huascarán, resulting in an ice-rock avalanche that killed more than 25,000 people.
- 1981: Tibet, a wave caused by a glacial ice mass falling into Cirenma Co killed 20 people.
- 2021: India, the Uttarakhand flood, also known as the Chamoli disaster, saw a Himalayan glacier break up and cause a flood that killed 100 people.
- 2022: Italy, 11 people died after a serac, a column of ice, slipped on the mountain of Marmolada in the Alps.
- 2025: Switzerland, a glacial collapse saw nine million cubic metres of rock and ice crash into the village of Blatten, wiping it off the map.
China and Tibet have not been ‘unaware’ that such an event could happen, Maximillian Van Wyk de Vries, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge who specialises in natural hazards, said, having spent years understanding how they unfold.
But both were more focused on glacial lake outburst floods, when a dam holding back a glacial lake fails. An ice-rock avalanche is ‘unexpected’.
Still, de Vries adds that it can be difficult to lay the blame for the Nepal-Tibet landslide on climate change, caused by humans burning fossil fuels.
The data, he stresses, is still patchy at best and it’s still too early to rule out other contributing factors.
‘I am sure research will shed more light on this, but for the people and communities impacted, the question of whether climate change was a contributing factor is somewhat secondary,’ de Vries says.
‘We will have to contend with these events whatever the answer to that question is.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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