How rising temperatures likely contributed to Nepal’s deadly flood
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- Nepal's flash floods on Wednesday killed roughly 160 people with hundreds still missing — including dozens of international tourists — after devastating footage showed walls of water sweeping away buildings and vehicles
- Satellite imagery and Nepalese government reports indicate the flooding was triggered by a landslide after a piece of glacier fell hundreds of feet into the valley below
- Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary, said satellite imagery suggested a 2,000-foot-wide piece of ice fell almost 4,000 feet, "pulverizing the ice into water"; the collapse registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event per the U.S. Geological Survey
- Joseph Shea, associate professor of geography at the University of Northern British Columbia, said glaciers in the region are "definitely in retreat," noting thinning and retreat as warming destabilizes the ice
- Nepal's glaciers lost nearly a quarter of their area between 1970 and 2010, and more than 160 smaller glaciers in the country have vanished entirely, according to cited research
- Shea warned that retreating glaciers leave large dammed lakes at higher elevations, where a sudden landslide can cause catastrophic overtopping — a glacial lake outburst flood mechanism that hit Nepal twice last year
- A recent study finds 40 percent of the world's glacial ice could disappear if global warming is not kept under 1.5 degrees Celsius
Why it matters: With more than 160 people already dead and hundreds missing, the disaster makes concrete what researchers have warned about for years: warming is actively destabilizing Himalayan glaciers, and millions live downstream of glacial lakes that could fail next. The fact that a single ice chunk falling 4,000 feet registered as a 5.2 earthquake shows how much energy these collapses release — and Nepal's 160-vanished-glaciers figure means this risk is growing, not theoretical.
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