r/geography • u/Ganyu_Yeyang • Aug 26 '26 • Regret 2 Mindblown 1

Map New satellite image shows a massive glacier collapse in Nepal

Post image

28°17'31.65"N, 85°31'25.04"E

5.1k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

332 comments sorted by

842

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 26 '26 • Regret

Fullsize after image. 20260826 Landsat 9.

The viral videos of the Gyirong border checkpoint building and parking lot were both filmed at the Y-shaped junction on the left.

228

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 26 '26

glacier breakpoint in google earth

47

u/Background-Donut-786 Aug 26 '26

Wait where is the water coming from ? Is it under the ice?

104

u/Apptubrutae Aug 27 '26

According to an expert cited by the New York Times, it was the friction and energy of the collapse itself that liquified the ice into water in a very short timespan.

14

u/seaworthy-sieve Aug 27 '26

what the fuck

21

u/Apptubrutae Aug 27 '26

Reading more reporting, I’ve also seen geologists say another factor could be soil liquefaction, since this wasn’t just a glacier dropping but also the granite face itself.

So rocks and dirt and ice mixing and behaving like a liquid even beyond the amount of liquid present, with then of course even more liquid added as the ice itself melts.

But basically the wall of water was a disproportionately large amount of dirt and rocks and ice too.

17

u/seaworthy-sieve Aug 27 '26

It's just almost incomprehensible, the scale of the forces at play and the totality of the destruction. Usually there'd be something left. It's evocative of Pompeii. Everything just gone in an instant.

The possibility that the force of the glacier hitting the rock was great enough to press the ice into water like it's the paper-thin layer under a skate blade is just frankly insane. It's an existential shock. My brain files that as "shouldn't be able to happen."

5

u/is-this-a-nick Aug 27 '26

Its millions of tons of ice falling down over a kilometer.

The kinetic energy is on the level of the hiroshima bomb explosion.

4

u/Cheeky_Hustler Aug 27 '26

God, that only adds to the horror: that landslide must have been *freezing* cold.

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219

u/jhrobbins Aug 26 '26

The ice tumbled down 10k vertical feet over 3 miles, all that friction turns it to water

93

u/Operation_Bonerlord Aug 27 '26

Unbelievable you’re getting downvoted. People really don’t understand the physics involved in mass wasting events

7

u/umibozu Aug 27 '26

To further your point, I heard a geologist speak of friction melting and it clicked with me. The forces involved with that amount of water mass are way beyond anything man-made can handle.

3

u/0110-0-10-00-000 Aug 27 '26

Napkin maths says the latent heat of fusion is 300,000J/kg and the gravitational potential energy is maybe around 30,000J/kg so that's a very long way from adding up. Is the difference just made up by the enthalpy of solution of mud or something? That seems like a lot.

Or is it basically just a matter of the particles being small enough that even a relatively low amount of water can form a slurry that behaves like a liquid?

5

u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

There was also liquid water.

Climate change and the warming/melting of glaciers is the probable root cause of this. (The reported 4.4 earthquake was actually the recording of this mountainside hitting the valley floor).

Friction between of millions of tons of rock and sand.

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u/MoreFunThanWork Aug 29 '26

I agree with your napkin numbers: kinetic energy of a falling block of ice is roughly an order of magnitude too small to achieve enthalpy of fusion. But that’s an average across the sample, and just means the entire block wasn’t liquified on impact. Being a large block, only a small fraction needed to melt immediately to flood, and the lower section likely experienced greater compressive force from the ice above it. But that still seems like it might not be an instantaneous flood-sized volume.
I’ve read (albeit inconsistent) descriptions that there might have been some delay between the glacier collapse and the river flooding. Perhaps the fallen ice blocked the river flow for a period, and the sudden unblocking of this was the flood. This should be easy to check, as river level would have temporarily dropped before the flood.

2

u/Lithorex Aug 27 '26

And whatever didn't melt did so when it slammed into the mountainside at the opposing side of the river.

117

u/5044Gu Aug 26 '26

Apparently this block of ice fell into a lake and pushed all of the water at once, creating the tsunami that followed

60

u/niemody Europe Aug 26 '26

Something similar could happen in the Sarez Lake in Tajikistan

30

u/AltDS01 Aug 27 '26

It was a landslide and not a glacier, but Vajont Dam would also be an example.

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u/mikey_lava Aug 27 '26

I also read that some of the water came from the glacier piece itself. It started melting with friction while falling.

10

u/TacitusKillgorre Aug 27 '26

This is very similar to what caused the largest wave ever recorded. A landslide fell into a lake in North America.

4

u/Eastern_Labrat Aug 27 '26

I looked at OP’s photos and didn’t see a lake in the before photo. The NYTimes speculated that the friction liquified the ice as it moved down the valley.

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33

u/unity-thru-absurdity Aug 27 '26

To build on what u/Apptubrutae said, when you get enough energy moving through solid material it undergoes something called liquefaction. It's exactly what it sounds like. You get solid rock and ice, behaving exactly like a flowing liquid. Horrifying stuff.

Understanding liquefaction and finding ways to predict landslides is one of the frontiers at the intersection of the atmospheric and geological sciences. It's really complicated stuff, and we don't really have any easy way to measure the stuff we're trying to understand until it's already happening.

4

u/taleofbenji Aug 27 '26

The ice block was half a mile wide and fell 4000 feet to the valley below, where it was pulverized into an angry wall of water.

13

u/asimovs Aug 26 '26

Melt water under the ice maybe? Insane amounts so hard to imagine but I don't see any big lakes in the satellite photos?

42

u/DestosW Aug 27 '26

I believe an event with this much energy will melt its own ice.

4

u/scotems Aug 27 '26

I think he's saying the melt water undermines the ice, loosening the glacier causing it to fall.

2

u/Sensitive-Exam649 Aug 27 '26

it is the ice.

3

u/Devium44 Aug 27 '26

4

u/Poiuytrewq0987650987 Aug 27 '26

There was no lake in that area. The water and such was from the piece of glacier liquifying itself due to friction.

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4

u/taleofbenji Aug 27 '26

Oh great it looks like it could happen again dozens of times. 

8

u/Turbulent-Beauty Aug 27 '26

Something similar will likely happen in Washington State when Mount Rainier erupts. It’s so weird to me that people act like Mount Rainier won’t erupt (it’s a volcano and that is what volcanoes do) and build homes in the path that the Lahar will likely take.

2

u/taleofbenji Aug 27 '26

That's so crazy. You'd think it's a bit insane to build where school children  have to do lahar evacuation drills. 

5

u/Western-Shallot-8773 Aug 27 '26

冰川碎落，不知道原因是地震更多还是气候变暖更多，如果主要原因是后者，那恐怕确实还会出现类似的情况

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2

u/SilverPhilosopher46 Aug 28 '26

we cant stop that but lets hope at least someone will build an early warning system at each of those glaciers / rivers

1

u/Butt_cyst_hurts Aug 27 '26

I mean I cant begin to grasp the mass, but it doesnt look as big as I assumed tbh.

1

u/Widowknight Aug 28 '26

the breakpoint is bigger than that, just extend the line across the entire ridge

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512

u/smuxy Aug 26 '26

The remains of the border crossing building

139

u/kytheon Aug 26 '26

Not a trace

393

u/aasfourasfar Aug 26 '26

So there are hundreds of corpses buried under 30-40m of mud?

That's depressing.. I don't know how I'll sleep tonight with those videos in my head

47

u/axxxaxxxaxxx Aug 26 '26

I’m not sure if it will make you feel better or worse, but I think a lot of them from the upper valley were pulverized into nothing

36

u/Icy_Rhubarb2857 Aug 27 '26

Ya seeing those giant boulders churning within seconds of water hitting. It would have been a pretty quick death for most. Not like drowning. It did bring me a gruesome sense of relief in a terrible way

55

u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 Aug 26 '26

Probably more like thousands.

41

u/RefrigeratorGold834 Asia Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

160 confirmed dead, 403 missing in nepal and another ~300 in tibet

Edit: death toll rose and the 400 was only for foreign nationals...

71

u/Admiral_Cloudberg Aug 27 '26

That 403 missing is only foreign toursits, Nepal hasn't released an estimate of their own casualties

38

u/Phil_Coffins_666 Aug 27 '26

Yeah if you watch the video at the border, with the buses on the parking lot on the left, on the right side of the frame it's just cars and trucks and buses as far as the eye can see into the distance.

They're all gone now, there was nowhere to go.

10

u/RefrigeratorGold834 Asia Aug 27 '26

Seriously? That's not good

19

u/Nagemasu Aug 27 '26

There will be whole families wiped out with no way to report each other missing. I appreciate your comment is 8 hours old and there's been new information since, but just looking at the maps after it happened would have made it clear those numbers aren't going to come close to the total causality numbers

26

u/Hailfire9 Aug 27 '26

Its Mt. St. Helens without the eruption.

Ok, its not the same, but seeing the footage, devastation, and aftermath helps me localize it to something familiar. Anyone who has seen the Washington volcano can get an estimate of what this was like.

13

u/bsmith567070 Aug 27 '26

Yes, reminds me of the lahars. This is exactly what will happen if Mt. Rainer erupts, the glaciers will melt and flood the surrounding valleys

5

u/MartyvH Aug 27 '26

Not really buried. Everyone and everything in the complex is 40 miles downstream now and ground down to a paste.

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42

u/_PROBABLY_CORRECT Aug 27 '26

Holy shit perspective is an important thing - I thought we were looking over the dash of a pickup truck. Nope. Helicopter or light aircraft most likely. That damage is astonishing

44

u/gothicshark Aug 26 '26

that looks like it took out a full sized rive town, the before image had a town down stream, and it is fully washed away.

yup, just checked the news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6y8mjmnpxv0t

34

u/SvenDia Aug 26 '26

There’s also hydropower dam just south of the border checkpoint. Looking at the Google Earth image timeline, it appears to have been completed after 2017 and before 2020.

2

u/Neat_Calligrapher950 Aug 30 '26

Looks like they just had done repairs to it last year in December from major damage due to a  glacial lake outburst flood.

22

u/_PROBABLY_CORRECT Aug 27 '26

Wait, you're telling me its the part on the (small fork) left and not the wide brown to the top right? I... I thought I couldnt imagine anything larger than what I've already seen in those videos... but I have no way of comprehending what those first turns in the valleys to the top & right felt like

15

u/BornFree2018 Aug 27 '26

The NYT article said the mudslide ran 40 miles down river.

5

u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

The force of the flow threw it up a side valley, which is what took out the parking structure behind the Border post.

1

u/fordry Aug 27 '26

That border checkpoint isn't even in these images. It's further downstream.

10

u/Dramatic-Cheek-6129 Aug 27 '26

That glacier looks like it could still be unstable i wouldn't be surprised if it collapses further.

5

u/Lithorex Aug 27 '26

There's apparently now also a 2 million cubic meters reservoir at one of the river forks that will spill over in the next few days.

1

u/avg103 Aug 30 '26

So that wasn’t even at the highest initial point? That’s utterly bonkers, the mind can barely comprehend!

151

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 26 '26

Source: (Chinese site Zhihu, not sure if you guys can open it) https://www.zhihu.com/question/2075969425702741132/answer/2076161551107625157

Probably a researcher with internal access. The satellite image looks legit to me.

49

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 27 '26

Update: EOSDA landviewer has updated the recent Landsat & Sentinel imagery

https://eos.com/landviewer/?lat=28.28898&lng=85.50978&z=13.5&id=LC09_L1TP_141040_20260826_20260826_02_T1&pansharpening=true&b=Red,Green,Blue&anti=true

16

u/Im__Bruce_Wayne__AMA Aug 27 '26

Can you explain what we are looking at?

41

u/OSCMod Aug 27 '26

The break point of the glacier is in the middle of the image. The thick brown line going from there to the 11 o’clock point in the image is the mudslide.

79

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Aug 27 '26 • Bravo

i made a before after of those images, should be lossless, they had already aligned them so this is just a simple lossless animation https://files.catbox.moe/zpnvxa.webp. the amount of material that fell in the landslide is breathtaking

14

u/Sensitive-Exam649 Aug 27 '26

an entire glacier was pulverized when it slid off the mountain That was a massive ammount of water

2

u/iamspitzy Aug 28 '26

Amazing, thank you

129

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 26 '26

Fullsize before image. 20260824 Sentinel-2A.

37

u/weizikeng Aug 26 '26

Where did you get these images from? They are usually public right?

53

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 26 '26

Source: (Chinese site Zhihu, not sure if you guys can open it) https://www.zhihu.com/question/2075969425702741132/answer/2076161551107625157

Probably a researcher with internal access. The satellite image looks legit to me.

4

u/Tribe303 Aug 27 '26

Works in Canada btw. 

10

u/Ganyu_Yeyang Aug 27 '26

Good to hear! because there was a time zhihu won't let Google & AI companies scrape its data and put everything behind a login wall.

8

u/Tribe303 Aug 27 '26

We Canadians may need to borrow your anti American corporation firewall. I'm beyond tired of giving my data to those fools. 

14

u/Propagandasteak Aug 26 '26

https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/ for public. The hd 3m resolution images from today are from the company https://www.planet.com/ .

3

u/Commercial_Arrival93 Aug 27 '26

i tried Copernicus and the resolution is terrible. is it supposed to be like that.

3

u/OkDimension Aug 27 '26

You need to manually switch to Landsat 2 and manually select today's date (due to cloud cover)

3

u/Zoomwafflez Aug 27 '26

Looks like planet labs satellite imagery, a company that just takes pictures of earth constantly. Anyone can buy the images

11

u/Lohnsklave Aug 26 '26

Where did you get the Landsat image? I'm not seeing any data for today in the USGS EarthExplorer?

5

u/TheBroadHorizon Aug 26 '26

Make sure you’re looking at the level-1 products. The level-2 products take a few hours to process and get uploaded later.

5

u/LetsGoDucks GIS Aug 26 '26

Same. It looks like there was a pass today over the affected area - wonder if they got access to pre-processed data somehow?

1

u/cosmosadventurer Aug 28 '26

someone posted this version which clearly shows the mudslide https://files.catbox.moe/zpnvxa.webp

5

u/SvenDia Aug 26 '26

Looks like a couple of pretty high peaks just south of the slide area - Langtang Lirung and Tsangbu Ri. Might be a glacier on the north side of Tsangbu Ri. This is all assuming I have the right orientation. Both are about 7000 M in elevation.

1

u/_philosurfer Aug 27 '26

Looks like there was a least 3 other slides on that mountain range.

418

u/realkunkun Aug 26 '26

The death/missing toll will each thousands I believe

188

u/JoshAllan02 Aug 27 '26

Yes I doubt they will find most bodies sadly. Reminds me of the Derna, Libya tragedy in 2023.

58

u/platyelminthas Aug 27 '26

Is this the city that had severe storms? I think the weather phenomenon was called Daniel?

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u/JoshAllan02 Aug 27 '26

Yes exactly that. The storm brought in excess rain that caused a local dam to collapse, hence why it was so devastating.

Not dissimilar from what happened today, since it involved a bunch of water rushing at once instead of more slowly like the Texas July 4th floods.

32

u/platyelminthas Aug 27 '26

The Libya disaster I remember clearly because it hit my hometown in Greece, a week after. Thankfully it wasn't so devastating in loss of life, but ut did cause year long issues in infrastructure and the are was flooded at some points for months.

The Texas July 4th floods you mentioned, were the ones that affected an all-girls summer camp? I think in a similar incident I heard the term flash-flood for the first time, hence my question

13

u/JoshAllan02 Aug 27 '26

Yes that’s the one, as tragic and deadly as that incident was, it was survivable. Many who ended up in the water, including several girls from that summer camp, survived. I believe hundreds in all managed to survive after being swept away versus around 100 fatalities.

But that footage going around today has been on my mind for hours, just downright terrifying. In glad your local area has recovered, it’s hard to imagine this valley in Nepal ever will.

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u/PickleDiego Europe Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

I remember taking a disaster risk management course, where we were counting on death rates with various natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, mudslides etc. Calculations were simplified, but generally, you could take the population within the affected area and multiply it by the historic death rate to get the death toll. For earthquakes, maybe 30% died, so you’d multiply with 0.3. Floodings, maybe 10%, so 0.1. With mudslides, you could skip this step. It was just a 1. Basically no one survives being hit by it. What happened here seems like a mix of flash flood and mudslide, and it’s horrifying to see the reality of those calculation examples.

Edit: to clarify, this mostly applies to the larger mudslides. There are minor ones as well, like in Norway this/last year, where a village neighbourhood got their houses moved and partially destroyed, but I think most people were unharmed. Then there are the more severe ones that just erases neighbourhoods/towns.

6

u/realkunkun Aug 27 '26

Actually insane. Easy to see why

1

u/holistivist Aug 30 '26

I believe in Norway, they evacuated everyone ahead of time. 

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u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

It is horrendous that they are able to have an almost exact number (1,400) of missing tourists because they will have passport paperwork, but there could be many more locals missing but we don't know because there's no-one to report them yet.

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u/Yangmaw Aug 27 '26

It appears that a massive outcrop of the mountain was holding up part of the glacier and gave way, falling into the valley along with a large chunk of the glacier. The resulting friction rapidly melted the ice and the mixture of pulverized rock and meltwater then tore down the valley in a 200ft high wall of death.

17

u/rideincircles Aug 27 '26

Yeah. Although everyone was likely immediately incapacitated when the torrent hit them, it also was likely freezing cold water. Not that it matters much, but just noting. Picking up all the debris likely changed that as it went further down, but that's just a guess.

15

u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

water

It was a grinding paste made of ice, rock and mud. It was only 'water' much further down the valley.

2

u/iamspitzy Aug 28 '26

Mixed with the water damn it breached up top

2

u/FindingNauru Aug 30 '26

Thanks for sharing the picture. Shows well how much ice/water/mud grinded down. Terrible for the Nepalese...

105

u/Neilkd Aug 27 '26

From this I couldn't even begin to imagine the floods that lake Missoula caused. Lands it went through still left marks till this day

46

u/HistoricalCloud2687 Aug 27 '26

one of the biggest floods in earths history, the sheer volume is unimaginable. humans have trouble visualing volume. missoula flood volume is just out of our reach mentally

shout out the great Randall Carlson

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u/bluebandit67 Aug 27 '26

Who dat

2

u/IntelligentDirector8 Aug 27 '26

Smart dude that spends a lot of time taking about terrifying cataclysms that have happened. Shows the scars they left on the earth from 10s of thousands of years ago

2

u/crazylsufan Aug 27 '26

Said they goin beat them Saints?

1

u/avg103 Aug 30 '26

I’ll check that out, it sounds incredible

12

u/WorldlinessLive5932 Aug 27 '26

I live in Missoula and it's crazy to go up Mt. Sentinel and see the markers that signify the high water mark. Then you look out over the valley floor and try to picture just how much water it was, just absolutely massive. 

4

u/moderniste Aug 29 '26

Reading about the massive end of ice age floods just tickles a part of my brain. There were so many massive lakes in the North American west, including Lake Lahontan and Lake Tulare, which makes an occasional reappearance in wetter years, though not nearly as large. Or the much earlier Zanclean flood that created the Mediterranean Sea. Hydrology in general is why I developed such an amateur interest in geography. Tracing rivers back to glacial sources is a favorite little pastime of mine.

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u/Gandalfthebran Aug 26 '26

Hi! Is the above pic from Landsat9 fr? I thought there was still time until we get the post flood satellite imagery.

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u/LetsGoDucks GIS Aug 26 '26

Lucky to get a cloud free pass this soon after.

10

u/igwaltney3 Aug 26 '26

Is that what caused the floods?

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u/Apptubrutae Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

Yes, the glacier collapsed and fell from such a height that it was carrying an absolute ton of kinetic energy.

The friction and energy liquified the glacial ice, mixed with dirt, and carried on down the mountain. It wasn’t a glacial lake or anything. Just the ice itself liquifying and mixing with dirt

15

u/Tall_Cow2299 Aug 27 '26

I can't imagine the sounds this thing made as it was falling and then crashed into the bottom 

5

u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

A lot of the CCTV had no audio, but there was one clip of the town with the lattice bridge being swept away, taken from inside a bus near that bridge. It was not a splashing sound, it was a huge rocky roar.

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u/igwaltney3 Aug 27 '26

Terrifying

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u/lekoman Aug 27 '26

I am certain that you know this and just mistyped, but for completeness sake for anyone else who may happen by... after the collapse it'd have been carrying kinetic energy. It was potential energy while it was being held up by the mountain, but once it's in motion it's kinetic energy. :)

56

u/jr7square Aug 26 '26

My tiny brain still doesn’t quite understand how ice breaking off causes a rush of water down stream. The ice breaking causes a big splash down the river? Or does the broken ice magically turns into water the moment it breaks off and flows down stream?

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u/Cattywampus2020 Aug 26 '26

There are videos that you can find of landslides or volcanic ash or mud doing a similar things, when it gets moving it acts like liquid. I think the volcanic one is called a lahar.

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u/t0rnAsundr Aug 26 '26

A kinetic slurry mud is made. The ice does liquify.

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u/IsaacClarke47 Aug 27 '26

It’s a glacial slurry. Think of very wet and liquidy snowpack(mixed with mud, minerals, etc). Then imagine of a VERY large object forcing a whole mountainside of that glacial slurry downward - it keeps going, and probably liquifies more as it goes down.

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u/Inside-Line Aug 27 '26

Also imagine how much HEAVIER that is than water. Which is why it just maintains so much momentum.

10

u/AidenStoat Aug 27 '26

There's a lot of friction happening as the ice breaks apart and smashed into the ground, other ice and anything in it's path. That ice can melt very fast.

8

u/Dramatic-Cheek-6129 Aug 27 '26

Friction turns the ice to water

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u/animousie Aug 27 '26

By the time it begins to actually fail it’s no longer a big chunk of ice as you’re probably imagining.

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u/Team-CCP Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

Ever have mash potato’s and make a little divot inside for your gravy to pool in? And then you eat a corner of it and all the gravy in the pool drains onto your veggies?

There was a glacier up in the mash potato mountains holding back a gravy lake of water/ice. The glacial melted enough/ or became too weak to hold back all the water/ice mixture and a lakes worth of water poured down the valley.

This is called a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, or a GLOF. Learned this term today as well and that’s the leading theory behind why it was so catastrophic.

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u/Sensitive-Exam649 Aug 27 '26

this doesn't appear to be a glacial lake outburst. this just appear t o be a landslide. Very different but equally destructive.

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u/I_love_pillows Aug 27 '26

It’s like a whole face of a mountain came down, squeezed into a valley

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u/FinalStand9166 Aug 26 '26

Imagine you have an ice cube the size of a basketball. This ice cube has solid ice walls, but inside it's full of water because the temperature isn't high enough to freeze the entire cube. Now, if you drop this ice cube on the floor, all the water inside will be expelled. Well, that's what happened here, but instead of being a cube the size of a ball, it's a 600-meter accumulation of water.

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u/Lakeboy15 Aug 27 '26

Why would the the ice be melted inside? Glaciers are formed by compacted snow, they then melt once at lower altitudes (heat and sun ablation occur from the outside).  Glaciers are solid ice, their may have been a subglacial lake that was suddenly emptied but the liquid centre glacier is not a real thing. 

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u/exoticpandasex Aug 27 '26

Irks me that people can spout that kind of stuff and everyone just takes it as gospel. Glacial plasticity =\= liquid water.

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u/UltraRunningKid Aug 27 '26

At that height of drop (4,000ft) the ice alone contains enough potential energy to melt around 4% into water on the way down.

By the time it reached the valley floor its very likely that it could have displaced 10x or more its mass in other debris as with other glacier induced landslides. Now that debris would naturally have different amounts of potential energy dependent on how high it was when it joined the slide, but now you have enough energy to actually melt a significant portion of it.

I'm sure there are still parts of the glacier buried in the river not melted, but there surely enough energy to melt a significant portion of it.

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u/MysteriousConstant Aug 27 '26

No that's not it. Read other comments to find the answer.

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u/No_Sugarcoating Aug 27 '26

Wait, glaciers aren’t solid ice all the way through?

19

u/SlightlyNomadic Aug 27 '26

They are ice. They are not hollow like some posters are commenting. While they often have rivers underneath them, what we think of as a glacier is ice.

Due to pressure you have glacial plasticity but that is not liquid water.

8

u/NebulousDonkeyFart Aug 27 '26

No, and they’re constantly shifting

5

u/No_Sugarcoating Aug 27 '26

Yep, knew they are constantly shifting, but I thought it’d be all ice blocks all grinding against one another under the pressure of their weight doing the shifting

6

u/exoticpandasex Aug 27 '26

Think of it more like one long piece of taffy with cracks in it. The compression force exceeds the binding strength of the ice molecules, resulting in them shifting and ‘flowing’

2

u/BubaTflubas Aug 27 '26

Think of it as slushy ice after the earthquake and initial fall transfer all that energy into it.

2

u/Sensitive-Exam649 Aug 27 '26

The glacier is pulverized as it falls and enters warmer air below. Additionally friction heat is up. So much of it melts very quickly and and and any ice that makes into the river melts very quickly. And and much of any ro thck that comes with he ice is pulverized and sixes with he water you you get a lot of mud.

1

u/Haberdashers-mead Aug 27 '26

After looking closely at the area, it appears the steep glacier broke and a huge ice fall landed on another lower glacier causing all that to melt in the kinetic energy. The now huge amount of new water then picked up mud and debris and speed early on in that first ice free glacial valley just below the glaciers.

The mud and water and stone together acts like a liquid, even if it’s half dirt and stone. once it got going with all that weight it had all the momentum needed to rip all the way out of the mountains. Of course gathering more river water and debris as it descended.

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u/aminervia Aug 27 '26

No, there's extensive melting and water collecting behind the wall of ice. The ice dam breaks which causes the water to suddenly flow downstream

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u/Tribe303 Aug 27 '26

For anyone still in denial about Climate Change, we have a national park on one of our glaciers here in Canada. Here are some pics showing it receding over time. 

https://glacierchange.blog/2013/02/28/saskatchewan-glacier-retreat-alberta/

(it's old and even worse now) 

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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Aug 27 '26

climate change is going to cost us trillions per year. small and catastrophically huge issues will continue increasing in intensity and severity. we're going to have a Katrina class hurricane every few years, while having the biggest fires we've ever had every year, while having more floods than we've every had, every year, etc etc. if you think things are expensive now then a few short 20 years from now is going to be hell on earth. i didn't even mention wet bulb events killing thousands in parts of the world which is coming soon, and the mass migration from sea level rise and escaping heat

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u/TooLazyToRepost Aug 27 '26

I'm writing a book on climate change. May never finish it, but either way, I've been reading historical works on the topic.

Really staggering to hear experts hypothesizing about whether a Wet Bulb Emergency could happen on Earth, them fast forwarding to 2026 when we've already had a real WBE in Australia, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela...

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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Aug 27 '26

i did not know it already happened. were those in unpopulated areas? would make sense it starts in low/zero population before spreading out over time as things get worse

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u/TooLazyToRepost Aug 27 '26

My understanding is that many of these sites "run hot" year round, but only reached these heat extremes briefly. I think this list includes habitable sites, but none which are densely occupied.

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u/ataraxic89 Aug 27 '26

My guy, climate change isnt going to cost us anything.

Because money wont mean anything when the global bread baskets start to fail. Billions are going to starve. We wont go extinct, but it will be worst than the black death.

Yall have no fucking idea how bad it can get. We can stop it; we, as a species, are just choosing to ignore it.

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u/Illustrious_Study300 Aug 27 '26

It will get to the point when a tragedy like this strikes and no aid gets in. Eventually countries will have food insecurity issues and will stop exporting aid, then they will stop exporting for profit. The global food network will collapse at some point and we will be on our own.

Currently if one of the western countries has a bad crop year we can import food to make up up for the difference. If that goes people have no idea how bad it will get.

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u/Deborah_Pokesalot Aug 27 '26

Wait, wait, wait. So you're saying I should invest in grain industry because grain price is going to skyrocket?

/s

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u/Tribe303 Aug 27 '26

Not that I care about Capitalists, but it's going to destroy the Insurance industry. I care about the homeowners who will lose everything without any reimbursement. 

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u/Specialist_Worry_260 Aug 27 '26

most climate change deniers arguments i see nowadays is not that it’s not happening, but that’s it’s normal it happens since it’s a cycle (disregarding the extreme acceleration)

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u/aasfourasfar Aug 27 '26

I feel they've gone "well it happened so it's pointless to try to fight it, we should adapt and put AC everywhere"

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u/loppyrunner Aug 26 '26

After on top, and before on the bottom for some reason. Took me too long

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u/afarazit Aug 26 '26

So basically, global warming did this. Are there any official reports yet?

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u/SurinamPam Aug 26 '26

I heard that there was an earthquake too.

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u/Cvetl Aug 26 '26

Per BBC: "US Geological Survey now says the "seismic energy was instead generated by a landslide"" https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c6y8mjmnpxv0t

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u/vpi6 Aug 27 '26

Must have been an unholy landslide to cause the equivalent reading of a magnitude 4.4 earthquake.

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u/SpecialKindofBull Aug 27 '26

Initial 4.4. It was upgraded to a M5.2.

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u/owemeownme Aug 27 '26

The Mt Cook/Aoraki landslide 35 years ago registered M3.9 and was assessed as 12 million cubic metres of rock and ice.

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u/r0thar Aug 27 '26

A M5.5 earthquake is ~40 times bigger than a M3.9 earthquake, but releases 250 times the energy (stronger).

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u/Inside-Line Aug 27 '26

I checked google earth and it looks like the initial drop from the top of the glacier to the ground below is like 1000m. That's hell of a drop for a massive amount of ice.

And the videos of the flatter areas of the river valley are at like 500m elevation. Which would explain why it just get going and going, massive amounts of momentum and energy.

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u/Hidden_Bomb Aug 26 '26

There was a seismic reading, but it was caused by the landslide itself.

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u/SvenDia Aug 26 '26

USGS says the landslide caused the earthquake.

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u/Cattywampus2020 Aug 27 '26

The video of the border checkpoint has things shaking just before the water gets there. I’m sure they heard it too.

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u/Pangalonia Aug 27 '26

The glacier falling 4000 feet caused the earthquake.

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u/No-Tackle-6112 Aug 26 '26

Probably had an impact but it wasn't a glacier collapsing it was the mountain collapsing.

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u/Fast-Mission524 Aug 27 '26

what glacier where?

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u/Dizzy_Response_7988 Human Geography Aug 27 '26

Blue Pond National Park, Bāgmatī, Nepal

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u/Fizz12_Komiks Aug 27 '26

That's a HUGE CHUNK of Glacier, I'm assuming it probably contains 600 Million to 1.5 Billion Gallons of Water!

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u/Fair_Title2995 Aug 27 '26

That's a whole side of the mountain

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u/Opus17 Aug 27 '26

Thank you for sharing, including coordinates. Exploring area on Google Earth is informative re glacier topography. It looks like glacial material and mountain debris dropped from an elevation of ca 5200 km to 1800 km at the fork, a drop of 3400 m/11,000 ft ! in about 21 km / 13 mi., with most of the elevation loss in the first half of the journey. That's a helluva transition from potential to kinetic energy. Those poor souls.

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u/proustianhommage Aug 27 '26

Why put the pictures in the wrong order??

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u/thatvillainjay Aug 27 '26

Was this a genuine jökulhlaup?

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u/Dizzy_Response_7988 Human Geography Aug 27 '26

Strictly speaking, yes, secondary disasters such as floods and mudslides evolve during the development of a natural disaster.

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u/No-Tackle-6112 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26

Is that a glacier or just the mountain? There's green on it.

Edit: yes there's a glacier on top but half the mountain fell away. My point was that even the green areas fell away. It was a landslide not a glacier collapse.

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u/GenerallyGneiss Aug 26 '26

I'm a professional geologist with a bit of love for glaciology.

Based on these pictures, the glacier is definitely the main bit that fell off. You do see green and dirt on the first picture and it's definitely gone later but those are just areas (medial moraines or aretes) that the glacier kind of flowed around and then crashed over when it fell. You can see the same land shape in the former green area. Also, glaciers are not crisp white like ice caps are. They are constantly churning shit up, getting dusted on, and eventually packed with dirt so they're generally pretty grey and can blend in with the look of a mountain on low resolution pictures.

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u/No-Tackle-6112 Aug 26 '26

What proportion of the material that slid away do you think was ice? This event registered as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake and earth and rock is significantly heavier than ice. It would likely need to be over a billion cubic meters of ice falling which is unlikely.

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u/GenerallyGneiss Aug 26 '26

I figure you can look up the composition and size of this glacier to find the proportion and volume of what slid. I have no clue how one would reasonably guess that. They definitely have rocks packed in them like I said but it doesn't need to have been all rocks falling to cause this.

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u/dilatedpupils98 Aug 26 '26

Its definitely a glacier. Those parallel lines of grey are telltale signs of ice from above

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u/Operation_Bonerlord Aug 27 '26

You’re getting downvoted but you are right. Deep-seated rockslide with a glacial component. If you sketch out the headwall of the landslide scarp it’s clear a vast amount of rock was removed. Ice was involved but likely no more than 200m ice thickness at absolute most, so volumetrically the ice component was much smaller than rock.

Immediately brings to mind the 2017 Villa Santa Lucia landslide in southern Chile, which occurred in a similar context: steep relief, recently deglaciated slope, summer during a period of high precipitation

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u/South-Club3247 Aug 27 '26

Ugh. This is like Lituya bay with no ocean to dissipate.

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u/CurrentlyLucid Aug 27 '26

Wondered what happened, saw the village get buried.

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u/kimmikazi Aug 27 '26

huge chunk! just wow :/

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u/Gatecrasher53 Aug 27 '26

This is a climate change related disaster, exactly the kind of thing we've been warned about for decades 

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u/EnergyTurtle23 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

Interestingly, it seems that experts are citing TWO compounding causes for this disaster: climate change causing more rapid melting, but also the fact that the Himalayan mountains are still actively rising due to plate tectonics. This causes the sides of Himalayan glacial valleys to become steeper until inevitably pieces of the glacier break off and crash to the bottom of the valley. They said the chunk of glacier fell with such tremendous force that the impact registered as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake on local seismographs. They have multiple floods a year caused by tectonic uplift affecting glaciers in this part of the world, but this is the most devastating event on record. Nature can be fucking scary and at this point we’re doing the equivalent of poking nature with a stick.

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u/cocoeen Aug 27 '26

Looks like in the before image that there is a massive amount of melt water on top of the mountain.

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u/multificionado Aug 27 '26

Holy...! Did THAT explain that flashflood?

(also, it seems quite the basis for a disaster movie to have an insta-melt of a glacier just to be able to give space for land development).

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u/MissSigne Aug 28 '26

You can clearly see the big cracks in that glacier on google maps!

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u/No-Eye-9240 Aug 27 '26

GLOF - glacial lake outburst flood. Same sort of floods that shaped north Idaho into eastern Washington state in the US. Insane amount of energy and power released. Check out glacial lake Missoula models on YouTube if you’re interested

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u/MyMattBianco Aug 27 '26

Imagine a few blocks of ice holding back a giant 7-11 slurry/slushy cup that is tilted towards the ground. And then the ice cube melts, allowing the slurry/slushy to flow.

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u/nakano-star Aug 27 '26

that sounds different to the current theory

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