In Nepal, the search for survivors – and climate answers – continues
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 39/100
| Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP People walk along a street lined with damaged and destroyed structures after flash flooding in the Nuwakot district of Nepal, Aug. 28, 2026. Loading...
Aug. 28, 2026, 6:34 p.m. ET | Richmond, Virginia; and Leh, India
At least 1,900 people are still missing and hundreds more have died after part of a glacier collapsed in Nepal on Wednesday, triggering devastating floods along the border of Nepal and the Tibet region of China.
While the immediate destruction has been irrefutable – surveillance video shows dozens of people running for their lives as a wall of mud crashes over a border crossing between Nepal and China – parsing out the environmental chain of events that contributed to the flood has been more difficult in such a remote location. Scientists from around the world are still studying what exactly happened, with greater detail expected in coming weeks and months.
As they examine the immediate causes, scientists are also expected to further analyze the role of climate change, which has elevated temperatures and altered glaciers around the world for decades.
Thousands of Nepalis are searching for those swept away in a massive flood near the border with China this week. At the same time, people around the world are searching for answers over what caused the disaster – and how likely it is to happen again.
Temperatures have steadily risen on Langtang Lirung, the mountain where the glacier collapsed, since at least the 1980s, according to high-tech European Union climate data sets. Climatologist Zeke Hausfather adds that the four most recent summers rank within the five warmest on record, and that this August is on track to break records as well. Additionally, the melting of these glaciers in this region has accelerated since 2000, and that “human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s ,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But attributing this particular event to climate change is premature, Dr. Hausfather wrote Friday in his newsletter , The Climate Brink, and that “the messy causality of rock-ice avalanches” means that a definitive “single-event attribution may never be possible.”
Still, there does appear to be broad scientific consensus that a warming climate is making disasters like this one in the Himalayas more common. And on the ground in Nepal, locals are watching their homes affected in real time.
“We are seeing changes in our mountains and glaciers, and we cannot ignore what that could mean for Nepal,” says Sita Shrestha, a social activist in Kathmandu who has been working with a group of volunteers to collect medical supplies for people affected by the disaster. “We need to look more carefully at how we protect this fragile environment and the communities that live here.”
Initially, scientists believed the flooding was the result of a glacial lake outburst flood, known as a GLOF, when an avalanche or earthquake causes part of a glacier to fall into the water below triggering a flood. As the Hindu Kush Himalaya region has experienced accelerated glacial melt over the past few decades, glacial lakes have proliferated – there are now more than 25,000 in the region, according to Nepal’s International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development – and GLOFs have become more common.
But what happened here is “really different,” says Eran Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska who studies GLOFs in his home state. Unlike GLOFs, which Dr. Hood helps monitor partially by measuring lake levels to predict an impending break, “The event we saw [in Nepal] is just really difficult to monitor and predict because you don’t know where that kind of collapse is going to occur.”
Scientists now believe that part of the glacier snapped off and fell to the valley below, temporarily damming a river before the force of water surged forward. The glacier collapsed with the energy equivalent to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Himalayas’ high-altitude permafrost, a mixture of soil and rocks frozen in place for thousands of years, has long held the local environment “together like glue,” says Alton Byers, a senior research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. But rising temperatures have made permafrost not so permanent. This accelerates the devastation of such a glacier break, allowing the tumbling, rapidly melting ice to pick up sediment and become “this slurry, liquid concrete,” says Dr. Byers, that traveled approximately 62 miles through northern Nepal.
Once search and rescue operations have concluded, experts can make their way up the mountain and do more analysis of the chain of events that led to the flood, says Dr. Byers. And if his experience studying glacial lakes in Nepal is any indication, this will include talking to locals who really understand the environment. During one research trip in 2017, local yak herders helped Dr. Byers and his colleagues realize that a large flood from a tiny glacial lake was triggered by a chunk of mountain that broke off – something sensors would not have detected.
SOURCE: Hugonnet and others (2021), rates of glacier surface elevation change, 2000–2019; glacier outlines from Randolph Glacier Inventory 6.0; lake and river outlines from OpenStreetMap
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