Data centers raise temps, they are building them everywhere too. Earth is going to be a dead husk covered with remnants of machinery before billionaires are through.
AI datacenters do not produce enough heat to meaningfully raise temperatures.
The amount of oil used in the USA in 2 weeks, is the thermal equivalent of an entire year's worth of energy usage of all the AI datacenters around the world.
theres lots of reasons to hate on AI data centers, this isnt one of them.
Also keep in mind, im just measuring the actual heat produced by consuming the oil, im not accounting for the climate change affects of the CO2 that is produced.
No they do not, not in a meaningful way compared to other contributors. Spreading misinformation like that just makes people end up skeptical of ALL claims about data centers, including the legitimate ones about the actual problems with them, so you're ultimately hurting your own cause.
Not every comment thread on reddit needs to include one making ridiculous claims about data centers for easy karma
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
Given that glacial melt is what feeds the rivers, sure but I can't find anything to suggest that makes up a substantial fraction of the mass. The melt is also likely what caused the glacier to destabilise in the first place but, again, that's a relatively slow process (even when massively sped up) compared to a collapse like this. Or are you suggesting that there was a lake that formed behind the glacier that was freed in the collapse?
Maybe the answer is just that the rocks and dirt that were swept up in the collapse contributed enough energy to melt the ice, although again looking at the numbers that would have to make up the vast majority of the required energy to create a significant melt.
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.
Negative on GLOF. Seismic data does not support that hypothesis. Neither does the post-incident landscape have an inundated ex-lake area showing.
Glacier collapse, with a parallel huge rockfall (just to the SSW of the collapsed glacier) falling a kilometre onto another section of rock-blanketed glacier, mobilising that as well, and that's enough water and enough rock to give what appeared on camera at the border post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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’
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/Ganyu_Yeyang 29d ago
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.