{"id":660215,"date":"2026-08-28T01:58:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/660215\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T01:58:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:58:37","slug":"satellite-images-reveal-rock-and-glacier-collapse-before-nepal-floods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/660215\/","title":{"rendered":"Satellite images reveal rock and glacier collapse before Nepal floods"},"content":{"rendered":"

As rescue teams searched for missing people<\/a> following catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border, Earth scientists reviewed satellite imagery for clues to the cause and assessed the devastation.<\/p>\n

The flooding Wednesday killed hundreds of people<\/a> in Nepal and Tibet, and hundreds more are missing, including foreigners and pilgrims. <\/p>\n

Geomorphologists Kristen Cook and Dan Shugar said initial images from Nepal were obscured by clouds and dust from the debris, so they could only see that part of a glacier had broken off from Langtang Lirung peak, near the border with Tibet. In clearer images from Thursday, they said they could see that the bedrock underneath the glacier had collapsed, taking the massive chunk of ice down with it and sending boulders and ice into the valley.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt shows the whole area without anything hidden, and we could see that, yes, it looked like there was not only this glacier that had failed, but a much larger chunk of the bedrock of the mountainside itself that had given way,\u201d said Shugar, associate professor at the University of Calgary. \u201cYou have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shugar said it\u2019s heart-wrenching to look downstream from there on the images, to where people were living, and see how the debris has buried villages. <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n The Nepal-China Rasuwagadhi border crossing is shown in a Vantor satellite image from April 19, 2024. (Satellite image \u00a92026 Vantor via AP)\n <\/p>\n

The Nepal-China Rasuwagadhi border crossing is shown in a Vantor satellite image from April 19, 2024. (Satellite image \u00a92026 Vantor via AP)<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/p>\n

\n The same border crossing is shown on Aug. 27, 2026, after catastrophic flooding. (Satellite image \u00a92026 Vantor via AP)\n <\/p>\n

The same border crossing is shown on Aug. 27, 2026, after catastrophic flooding. (Satellite image \u00a92026 Vantor via AP)<\/p>\n

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After slamming to the valley floor, the debris maintained its momentum through the steep, narrow valley as ice melted, said Cook, at the Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes in France. Water and mud several stories high swept through communities.<\/p>\n

The Trishuli River surged during the flooding. Before and after satellite images of the Kolpurtar, Betrawati and Syapru Besi areas of Nepal show that the river is now much wider, and brown and black, because it overtopped its banks in some areas and filled with debris in others. The change in the color of the water shows how much sediment the flow was carrying, turning from greenish to very brown because it\u2019s full of mud, Cook said. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Towns and villages that were devastated along the river banks are submerged in debris and mud. They appear as areas of brown. Some houses are still poking through in an image of the Betrawati area. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The flooding toppled and swept away buildings in Syapru Besi, a popular tourist spot where a famous trek to Langtang begins. In before and after images, a side river is now wider too, because the flow was so powerful it pushed upstream. <\/p>\n

The flooding \u201cleft a wasteland in its wake\u201d that will take many years to recover from, said Alton Byers, a mountain geographer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Byers lived in Nepal and now returns there yearly to study glacial hazards and work with communities to prepare. This is the largest glacier flood he has seen, by far. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Byers, faculty research scientist at the university\u2019s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said he thinks Wednesday\u2019s flooding is related to climate change. The Earth\u2019s warming is melting glaciers and permafrost, causing instability and the breakage of massive amounts of snow and ice at high altitudes. That can be a catalyst for a series of cascading events, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the indicators, to me, point to the impacts of warming trends,\u201d he said. \u201cIn this case, the permafrost that for millennia has helped to hold together high-altitude rock and ice and soil and glaciers is now weakening and becoming unstable.\u201d <\/p>\n

Cook and Shugar said that at this point, they can\u2019t say for sure there\u2019s a direct link to climate change. Slopes fail and landslides happen, Cook said, though permafrost is melting and that is destabilizing mountainsides. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhile we cannot at this point directly link this collapse to climate change, it is not unexpected to see more events of this type with a warming climate,\u201d Cook said. \u201cNot this big, hopefully not this big.\u201d <\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As rescue teams searched for missing people following catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border, Earth scientists reviewed satellite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[270],"tags":[10852,3898,3477,442,23045,278991,7844,18,10916,3334,9343,19,17,278992,1371,8396,278990,133,451,21767,6921,66],"class_list":["post-660215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-asia-pacific","tag-climate","tag-climate-and-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-dan-shugar","tag-earth-science","tag-eire","tag-floods","tag-general-news","tag-glaciers","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kristen-cook","tag-natural-disasters","tag-nepal","tag-nepal-tibet-floods","tag-science","tag-space","tag-tibet","tag-waterways","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117170662297892754","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}