Wall of floodwater sweeps away villages in Nepal, with hundreds missing

Wall of floodwater sweeps away villages in Nepal, with hundreds missing

A massive flood potentially caused by a chunk of ice breaking off from a glacier has swept away bridges, schools, and other buildings and killed at least 160 people

A huge flood, thought to be triggered when a large chunk of ice broke off a high mountain glacier, has swept through settlements in Nepal and Tibet, an autonomous region of China. The waters—seen with people trying to run away on surveillance footage—crashed through buildings. And they have killed at least 160 people, with hundreds more missing, including foreign tourists, according to officials in Nepal and China.

Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Grenoble Alpes University in France, says that seismic data indicated the cause was not an earthquake. Rather the data suggest “that there was some type of large mass wasting event,” she says. “Mass wasting is what we use when we don’t know if it’s a landslide or an avalanche or rock avalanche or what type of of mass fell down a hill, but some type of mass fell down a mountain.”

Satellite imagery and further data allowed researchers to pinpoint the mountain, she says: Langtang Lirung. It is the 99th highest mountain in the world.

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Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, found satellite imagery that appears to show a chunk of glacier about 2,000 feet wide that broke off and caused what is called an ice avalanche as it dropped almost 4,000 feet. “The bottom looks like a bomb exploded—it’s just deposits from the broken-up glacier,” he told the New York Times . The flow of the pulverized ice moved down a valley toward the Bhotekoshi River at the border between Nepal and Tibet.

“It’s a very large event. It’s really shocking, the magnitude,” Cook says. Based on the seismic data, researchers estimate that hundreds of millions of tons of material, probably a “significant amount of rock,” as well as ice, might have collapsed, she says. But, she cautions, this is “a very back-of-the-envelope estimate that needs to be confirmed.”