In 1985 in December my family and I traveled first to Thailand and then to Nepal and India and we left our trekking backpacks at the Maha Laxmi Hotel in Kathmandu, Nepal then when we traveled to India to Bodhgaya to meet a Tibetan Lama friend we had met in Santa Cruz, California 2 years before. Then my friend was playing music concerts in Switzerland and was upset we had gone without him as it had been a lifelong dream of his and mine to go to the HImalayas because of Tibetan Buddhism and everything else there. So, he flew from Switzerland to Pakistan to Kathmandu, Nepal and met us when we returned from India two months later. We then traveled to Chitwan National park together with my family and we rode elephants and ran away from rhinos together and my wife and I hid in trees when one chased us up the trees and butted the tree I was hiding in so the rhino didn't kill me or my wife then. But, he wasn't able to knock me out of the tree even though it swayed a lot then but we never did get a good picture of rhinos because my wife had the camera in another tree. But, the good thing is neither of us died there then.
Later we got a trekking permit and climbed up to Tarkye Gyan at about 9000 or 10,000 feet elevation in the Helambu area not far from where the disaster happened this week. Helambu would be west of the Gyirong Port where everyone died this week. Gyirong Port is likely the main shipping route year around from India and Nepal if you are traveling overland by Car, Truck or Bus to Tibet and China from Nepal and India because the highest altitude I'm told is around 9000 feet elevation along this river road. But, I think this road has been wiped out in many places so things will now likely have to travel over a 20,000 foot pass west of there which is a direct route to Lhasa, Tibet but it's much easier to die on that 20,000 foot pass than the Gyirong Port route too. If your vehicle breaks down at 20,000 feet you likely won't survive it. At least this was true in 1985 and 1986 when my friend saw a whole busload of dead people at the top of this mountain road pass then when the bus broke down and they all died of exposure and lack of oxygen.
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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.
Satellite images show bedrock and glacier collapsed on Nepal-China border, then rivers flooded
As rescue teams searched for missing people following catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border, Earth scientists reviewed satellite imagery for clues to the cause and assessed the devastation.
The flooding Wednesday killed hundreds of people in Nepal and Tibet, and hundreds more are missing, including foreigners and pilgrims.
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.
“It 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,” said Shugar, associate professor at the University of Calgary. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.”
Shugar said it’s heart-wrenching to look downstream from there on the images, to where people were living, and see how the debris has buried villages.
After slamming to the valley floor, the debris maintained its momentum through the steep, narrow valley as ice melted, said Cook, at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. Water and mud several stories high swept through communities.
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’s full of mud, Cook said.
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.
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.
The flooding “left a wasteland in its wake” 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.
Byers, faculty research scientist at the university’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said he thinks Wednesday’s flooding is related to climate change. The Earth’s 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.
“All the indicators, to me, point to the impacts of warming trends,” he said. “In 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.”
Cook and Shugar said that at this point, they can’t say for sure there’s a direct link to climate change. Slopes fail and landslides happen, Cook said, though permafrost is melting and that is destabilizing mountainsides.
“While 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,” Cook said. “Not this big, hopefully not this big.”
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