More than 1,300 are missing in Nepal and Tibet after catastrophic floods caused by glacier collapse

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-nepal-tibet-glacier-collapse-floods-61b592d428e4631add31ce052d0daf1f

DEVIGHAT, Nepal (AP) — Rescue teams searched on Thursday for hundreds of missing people along the Nepal-China border after a catastrophic and deadly torrent of floods and mud swept through several communities a day earlier following a glacier collapse.

The disaster left at least 168 people dead and more than 1,300 missing, including foreigners and pilgrims, and displaced hundreds of people across the Himalayan region.

240 points · 18 comments · view on lemmy.world

18 Comments

motoxjake@lemmy.zip · 45 pts · 2d (3 replies)

Terrifying video and the lives lost is saddening.

MouldyCat@feddit.uk · 23 pts · 2d

Terrifying video

my god you weren't exaggerating, that is absolutely horrific

CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 2d (1 reply)

Jesus christ I can't believe how fast that water/debris is moving. It almost looks like VFX from a movie.

cannedtuna@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 2d

Thought the same. Looks like that movie 2012 or something, it just doesn’t seem believable that something that cataclysmic could happen. Horrifying and tragic

WizardGed@lemmy.ca · 17 pts · 2d (1 reply)

That's devastating, the kind of power behind that and with how fast it must have moved I doubt there was much of a chance for those in the way to escape. Not much you can do to stop a massive glacier like that from collapsing in this warming world. The people affected by this have my deepest sympathies.

ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 2d

The video showed the timeframe for it. About ten paces worth of running was the most they had.

Manjushri@piefed.social · 13 pts · 2d

Melting glaciers have become more common because of human-caused climate change.

Holy crap! I'm not used to the media acknowledging anthropogenic climate change! Thank you, Associated Press!

stretch2m@infosec.pub · 13 pts · 2d

If I lived anywhere downstream of a glacier, I would be getting quite nervous. Those videos are harrowing. The one at the border crossing looks like a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie.

rabber@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 2d (1 reply)

There's gotta be way more missing than that. Those videos are completely insane.

Tiral@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 2d

There are. It's the CCP, well they were taken over by the CCP, it's like Hong Kong.... it's CCP controlled but called Hong Kong. Anyways, you need to probably 5x the missing toll from whatever is publicly reported. China is still dying in the hill that they had 60k covid deaths when it's closer to 1-1.5 million.

Arancello@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 2d (5 replies)

has it been proven to be a glacier collapse? I listened to a Nepalese Govt radio interview in which they stated it was an earthquake

nulluser@lemmy.world · 37 pts · 2d (3 replies)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-the-catastrophic-flash-flood-in-nepal-and-tibet-and-how-does-a-glacier-collapse

However, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said that while the event was initially reported to be caused by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, further analysis showed the “seismic event was a glacial collapse and debris flow that caused subsequent catastrophic impacts downstream” and “no earthquake had occurred”.

The USGS noted the glacial collapse had registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event on the Richter scale, occurring near the border between Nepal and China at 8.37am local time on Wednesday.

According to Assoc Prof Daniel Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, initial satellite analysis showed a 0.2 sq km chunk of ice “collapsed about 1.2km vertically”.

“What I can see in … satellite imagery from Planet Labs, the lower part of a glacier broke off at about 5,200 metres and crashed onto the valley floor about 1,200 metres below,” he wrote on Bluesky.

ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 2d (1 reply)

So much carnage from something so relatively small, but doing the math, a 0.2 cubic chunk would weigh a nice massive 200 million metric tons.

credo@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2d

That would be 8,000,000 cubic meters, mostly ice I think. Seems to be happening a lot lately.

This one from alaska last year was 64M cubic meters of rock (related to melting glaciers I guess?):

The sheer power of that amount of rock plunging into the fjord in under a minute created a gigantic wave almost 500 metres tall.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1m253033m4o

VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 2d

Thanks!

poVoq@slrpnk.net · 8 pts · 2d

I think the latest theory is that is was a landslide that caused a partial glacier collapse, and the force of that registered as an earthquake on instruments.

PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 2d

Donate to the Nepal Red Cross

Bluedragon012@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d

I.. I hope they didn't have to suffer for long.. I hope thier body gave up and passed out on impact... Because this is a terrible way to go..