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Tibet flash flood

The sheer power and scale of the mudslide/ flood and destruction it caused is so terrifying. It looks like something out of a film but this is real and with so many lives lost. RIP to those. No doubt there will be so many buried or unaccounted for.
 
The numbers coming out of this are going to be terrible. Must have been terrifying to experience, rip :(
 
before-and-after-of-syapru-beshi-one-of-the-affected-areas-v0-hx7k3vbuuplh1.webp
 
The thing that frightens me more is we'll probably never know the full death toll as it appears to have affected Tibet as well and nothing coming from the Chinese State will be truthful.

I have a recurring nightmare very similar to what actually happened here, I don't even want to imagine what must have been gooing through the poor victims minds as that wall of mud and debris came towards them :(

RIP to all those who lost their lives :(, I have quite a few friends in Nuneaton who are ex Gurkha, I pray that none of their families have been affected.
 
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So it looks like it was caused by a glacier collapse. Catastrophic!

My young lad's best mate at school is from Nepal. He is such a polite and well behaved lad, both he and older sister are and spend lots of time around our house. My OH is now great friends with the parents who are equally as lovely.

We're just hoping that all their family back in Nepal are OK and waiting to hear from them.
 
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It could all get worse for them whilst searching for survivors:

BBC said:
A lake of rising water has formed at a site along the China-Nepal border prompting fears that it could burst its banks - just as rescuers try to find survivors after yesterday’s landslide.

Chinese search teams in Tibet have spent the day assessing the risk of flooding near Gyirong port after a lake formed near the confluence of Nepal’s Chochen river and the Puruchangpo Zangbo river.

They told state media that stabilising this body of water was a priority to keep rescue personnel on the ground safe.

China’s Ministry of Water Resources has used modelling techniques to estimate how much water is in the lake and now say that with continued rainfall, there is a high risk it could burst within the next three days.

The ministry said it will prepare for a potential breach and provide support for emergency rescue efforts.
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I take it there is no advanced warning to something like this?

it also makes you question living in an area like that. Those valleys were most likely created in a similar way millions of years ago. It is only natural that mother nature will do the same at some point.
 
adam cool dude said:
I take it there is no advanced warning to something like this?
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You could only get advanced warning if you had a monitoring system in place, it can be done - https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/...ng-alps-rockslide-122800632.html?guccounter=1 but you can't monitor everywhere, especially somewhere as remote like the Himalaya's even more so with the government's concerned, they don't exactly prioritise health & safety unlike the West, maybe this disaster makes them wake up though, or we just go back to burying heads in the sand on the effects of climate change, some effects you can't change, like mountains collapsing due to receding ice, but you could at least move the people in the way of the mountain to prevent deaths


Similar happened in Alaska, fortunately no boats were nearby as they do tours to the glacier, they don't have warning system either

earthquake.alaska.edu

The case for a landslide monitoring program | Alaska Earthquake Center

On the evening of Aug. 9, 2025, passengers on the Hanse Explorer finished taking selfies and videos of the South Sawyer Glacier, and the ship headed back down the fjord.
earthquake.alaska.edu earthquake.alaska.edu

Believe similar can happen in Norway in the Fjords as mentioned in above link
 
adam cool dude said:
I take it there is no advanced warning to something like this?

it also makes you question living in an area like that. Those valleys were most likely created in a similar way millions of years ago. It is only natural that mother nature will do the same at some point.
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I think they have stuff in Switzerland, there was a town recently they evacuated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Blatten_glacier_collapse I think that is the one I am thinking of.
 
adam cool dude said:
I take it there is no advanced warning to something like this?

it also makes you question living in an area like that. Those valleys were most likely created in a similar way millions of years ago. It is only natural that mother nature will do the same at some point.
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The melting glaciers are in the chinese (tibet) side and apparently theres zero communication between Nepal and china so even if they knew it seems they didn't pass it on. If they could and its doubtful they would the chinese govt doesn't reveal anything about whats happening on their side of the border its only satellite photos that reveal whats happening over there. In geologic timescales this has happened many times and on massive scales one flooded half of the continental US when Glacial Lake Missoula burst leading to the sudden release of 500 cubic miles of water
 
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adam cool dude said:
it also makes you question living in an area like that. Those valleys were most likely created in a similar way millions of years ago. It is only natural that mother nature will do the same at some point.
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For practical reasons people gravitate to water and it's (usually) much easier living at the bottom of a valley than up the side of a mountain. If this is going to become a recurring phenomenon and the government(s) can't stop it (what sort of resources are required to secure a glacial dam?) then those areas either become depopulated, or they rebuild and large scale loss of life happens again.
 
Building on the floodplain is common everywhere. It's nice and flat, got soil to grow things and you don't have to chisel through rock to build a house.

Here you get a bit damp and moan that the council didn't pour enough concrete around the river to protect property prices.

Over there you get obliterated by a billion tons of water/ice/mud/rock ploughing down the valley.

Same same.
 
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