Nepal's Deadly Disaster Exposed A Himalayan Risk India Can't Easily See

(MENAFN- Live Mint) Srinagar: Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist with Kathmandu University, was in a discussion on glaciers, permafrost, snow and mountain hazards on the morning of 26 August when reports of the disaster arrived.

A torrent of water, mud, rock and debris was barrelling down the Lhende Khola valley along the mountainous Nepal-Tibet border, killing thousands as it tore through three major Nepali districts spanning roughly 100km.

Early accounts suggested a glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, in which a glacial lake suddenly releases a large volume of stored water. But as Chand and his colleagues reconstructed the event, a different sequence emerged. There had been no lake at the point of failure. A massive ice-rock the size of six football fields had broken loose from a mountain and transformed into a destructive debris flood downstream.

“We had no clue how it happened, so we coordinated with Chinese scientists across the border to identify the cause and location of the ice-rock failure,” Chand, a scientist with Kathmandu University's Himalayan Cryosphere, Climate and Disaster Research Center, told Mint.

The collapse generated a seismic signal equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. On 5 September, Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority said 1,344 people had been killed and 5,531 remained missing.

The Himalayas have always been unstable, shaped by steep slopes, active tectonics that can cause high-magnitude earthquakes and landslides, and glaciers accompanied by repeated freezing and thawing. What is changing is the environment in which these operate.

The Nepal disaster showed how a mountain failure can begin without the warning signs associated with a glacial lake and change character downstream. For India, whose Himalayan region is home to almost 33,000 glaciers and stretches nearly 2,500 km across Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim, it raises a difficult question: are existing monitoring systems watching the right risks?

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