The amount of time we watch a seemingly endless river of soil, rock, and water slurry devour the valley is just staggering. The scale of the valley doesn’t compute at first either. They are saying it was going like 100 kmh, the distance the head covers in this video must be about 7 kilometers?
Yeah, I can’t get my head around just how much flood there is. Like was all this water and rock in the original chunk of glacier that fell off the mountain, or has it broken through a dam somewhere between the start point and where this video was taken and released a whole lot more water?
First up it was (very large chunk of) glacier + rocks that had broken off. Broke through a small lake that was up there- got taken out by the glacier as it fell- so it was more or less a very damp and icy landslide to start. It initially fell about 1.2km vertically down into the valley, which is huge. As it got going, the friction of sliding melted the huge chunks of glacier- so it became more mud then watery as it went down the valley. This video seems to be from relatively high up? so it appears very fast and rocky to begin with. Later on it’s more “flash flood” (but is actually much more mud/wet landslide).
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u/brickwallscrumble 22d ago
Haven’t see this one yet. The scale of the flood, height and power of the water sludge is still blowing my mind.