Catastrophic floods kill over 390 in Nepal and Tibet, with more than 1,400 missing
apnews.com
Rescue teams and military helicopters are searching for hundreds of missing people after flash floods on the Nepal-China border.

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.

  • Null User Object@lemmy.world
    37·
    13 days ago

    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·
      13 days ago

      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·
        13 days ago

        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