What we know about the link between Nepal’s flash floods and our climate crisis — SkimNews
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- Langtang national park lost a massive rock-and-ice mass at 8:37am local time last Wednesday, which sheared 1,200 metres to the valley floor about 60km north of Kathmandu.
- Flood waters swept down the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers between Tibet and Nepal at speeds approaching 150km/h, with the Trishuli rising nine metres in half an hour and washing away homes, roads, bridges and power plants.
- The death toll approached 1,000 with more than 4,400 people missing on both sides of the border; rescue efforts were hampered by bad weather, poor access and two new lakes formed by the landslide.
- Satellite analysis showed the cause was bedrock beneath a glacier collapsing — registering as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event — overturning initial reports blaming either an earthquake or a standalone glacial collapse.
- Nepal PM Balendra Shah called the event "not an ordinary" and said Himalayan climate risks must be raised with the international community.
- The UN said in 2023 that Nepal's mountains have lost close to one-third of their ice in just over 30 years, with the Himalayas warming twice as fast as the global average.
- Nepal holds more than 2,000 glacial lakes, 21 of which the UN classifies as potentially dangerous, though the article stresses this specific disaster was NOT a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOFs have caused more than 12,000 deaths globally).
Why it matters: Scientists explicitly say this disaster was NOT a glacial lake outburst flood — it was bedrock beneath a glacier collapsing, a failure mode current early-warning systems aren't built to catch. With Nepal holding 21 UN-flagged dangerous glacial lakes and warming at double the global rate, downstream communities in Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and Pakistan face a compounding hazard that monitoring infrastructure cannot yet predict.
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