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More than 1,300 are missing in Nepal and Tibet after catastrophic floods caused by glacier collapse (apnews.com)

submitted 22 hours ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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DEVIGHAT, Nepal (AP) — Rescue teams searched on Thursday for hundreds of missing people along the Nepal-China border after a catastrophic and deadly torrent of floods and mud swept through several communities a day earlier following a glacier collapse.

The disaster left at least 168 people dead and more than 1,300 missing, including foreigners and pilgrims, and displaced hundreds of people across the Himalayan region.

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[-] nulluser@lemmy.world 34 points 21 hours ago

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-the-catastrophic-flash-flood-in-nepal-and-tibet-and-how-does-a-glacier-collapse

However, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said that while the event was initially reported to be caused by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, further analysis showed the “seismic event was a glacial collapse and debris flow that caused subsequent catastrophic impacts downstream” and “no earthquake had occurred”.

The USGS noted the glacial collapse had registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event on the Richter scale, occurring near the border between Nepal and China at 8.37am local time on Wednesday.

According to Assoc Prof Daniel Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, initial satellite analysis showed a 0.2 sq km chunk of ice “collapsed about 1.2km vertically”.

“What I can see in … satellite imagery from Planet Labs, the lower part of a glacier broke off at about 5,200 metres and crashed onto the valley floor about 1,200 metres below,” he wrote on Bluesky.

[-] VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 hours ago

Thanks!

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 11 hours ago

So much carnage from something so relatively small, but doing the math, a 0.2 cubic chunk would weigh a nice massive 200 million metric tons.

[-] credo@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

That would be 8,000,000 cubic meters, mostly ice I think. Seems to be happening a lot lately.

This one from alaska last year was 64M cubic meters of rock (related to melting glaciers I guess?):

The sheer power of that amount of rock plunging into the fjord in under a minute created a gigantic wave almost 500 metres tall.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1m253033m4o

this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026

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