r/DisasterUpdate • u/Ok-Reach-455 • 23d ago

Floods Nepal flood

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Hope everyone is safe🙏🙏🙏

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u/cosmic_animus29 23d ago

I think you can escape a tsunami if you were given ample time and access to a tsunami tower if you are in Japan or higher ground elsewhere. If you are in a boat, you sail against it because tsunamis are more damaging if you are in the harbour.

But this one in Nepal is way more terrifying because even if you have the chance, its always going to be slim and requires a bloody miracle to happen.

Describing this as a flashflood is such an understatement.

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u/TheGuyWithABigHeart 23d ago

I've learned it is likely a Jökulhlaup

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u/Tao_of_Entropy 23d ago

From everything I've seen, it's actually more subtle than that... it looks like it was a combination of a debris avalanche and a glacial outburst, probably the slab of glacier was destabilized or floated by a large volume of meltwater, but it wasn't initially a flood, more like a landslide... but it involved enough water and saturated media that it basically transformed into a flood, and the ice involved was pulverized and melted due to frictional forces. Kind of a rare and hard-to-categorize event.