I don't think I've seen a snuff film of that scale before. I'm not good with even fictional horror. This may haunt my dreams. For most of the people there was just nothing they could do. But others would have had a chance if they had run perpendicular to the flow and climbed like their life depended on it. I'll try to remember that the next time I'm fleeing in panic from a flash flood.
Looks like a warning siren could have saved some lives. But apparently this was a black swan.
ANH [3 hidden]5 mins ago
| But apparently this was a black swan.
What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.
throwup238 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There have been maybe three such events in the 21st century (glacier or landslides producing more than a magnitude 5 quake), and none of them have happened in an area like the Himalayas. The other two were in Alaska on Mt Steller in 2005 and the Lamplugh Glacier in 2016, neither of which produced massive downstream floods.
It usually takes entire icebergs calving off to produce such seismic events and intense monsoons to create such flooding.
ElProlactin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> There have been maybe three such events in the 21st century
It seems that past history (especially recent) will not be a good predictor of future events.
throwup238 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Spoiler alert: that’s the whole point of a black swan event.
ElProlactin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A black swan event is an event that is unpredictable because it is so rare.
While I'd wait for confirmation about the cause of this specific incident, the point you seem to be ignoring is that, due to climate change, events that would have been considered "black swans" historically will become more and more common, to the point that they are expected to occur.
throwup238 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think that’s a misreading of the entire book. A black swan event is a rare, high-impact outlier that is nearly impossible to predict under normal circumstances, but is rationalized as having been inevitable in hindsight.
ElProlactin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For whatever reason, you continue to try to ignore the point I'm making, which is that, in terms of natural disasters related to climate in particular, what would have been "rare, high-impact outlier[s]" are increasingly becoming common enough to be not rare and not outliers.
scheme271 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There was another similar flood on the same river about a year or two ago. The problem was the the glacial flooding started in Tibet and affected people just over the border (one of the videos is from the border crossing). There's no international data sharing for this sort of thing between China and Nepal and Nepal can't deploy sensors in Tibet to give sufficient warning.
ghastmaster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Perpendicular is not the scientifically best path. 45 degree angle is the best angle if the threat is moving toward you at the same velocity that you can move. As the velocity of the threat increases, the angle gets closer to perpendicular. The size of the threat and distance of course matter as well. I think about this before tree felling. In chainsaw classes they teach you to move at a 45.
Reason077 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Looking at the footage, the water/avalanche was moving far faster than anyone could move on foot. Well over 100 km/h, I would estimate.
dreamcompiler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Likewise if your car stalls on a railroad crossing, run at a 45 degree angle toward the train. This puts you away from the path of flying debris.
suzzer99 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder if the river went dry first, like the water receding off into the horizon before a tsunami?
ghastmaster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It is possible if you consider madaxe_again's theory(comment here). If the debris just started descending without interruption, there would be no receding.
suzzer99 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well supposedly it was caused by a landslide blocking the river for a few minutes, then the dam burst all at once.
colechristensen [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The great flood myths across the world are quite possibly ancestral memories of this kind of flood on a continental scale. Retreating ice age glaciers would make lakes the size of states held at bay by an impromptu dam of various kinds of debris (or more glacier) which then would break dumping great lake amounts of water hundreds of miles into the ocean within days. This kind of thing probably happened in lots of places.
delichon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You just pushed me into a rabbit hole called the Zanclean megaflood.
I think the Japan tsunami videos showed as many, but it was spread out over the course of almost 2hrs and happened in slow motion over a large area. You could see some cars speeding to safety while others were washed away. Some stayed in taller structures assuming they were safe and were slowly washed away.
alephnerd [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It is harrowing. It also explains why the villages in my ancestral region in India (JK, HP, UK) with close cultural and ethnic ties with Nepal used to build them at the upper portions of the sides of mountains/hills and only shifted to building at the bottom of those kinds of valleys when motorized roads became a thing in the 20th century.
Rescue operations in Nepal are in good hands, but this is sadly because those same response orgs had to respond to a similarly brutal cloud burst floods back in 2013 [0], 2021 [1] and 2025 [2].
It also shows the very real and brutal effect climate change is already having, and will only get worse.
150 confirmed with 47 Americans? Surprising fraction. Mountaineers or that area is popular for some reason?
adelie [3 hidden]5 mins ago
it's a popular area for tourists and mountaineers, but also i think it's a lot easier to estimate missing/dead tourists since most of them will be there with tours/companies that have to keep track of exactly where they are.
tppiotrowski [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Syabru Besi is downriver of the border and the starting point for the Langtang valley trek which is probably the third most popular trekking location in Nepal (behind Everest basecamp and Annapurna circuit). I think the tourist data they have is from tourists that are traveling with guides but from my experience many tourists also bypass the official requirements and trek solo so the number could be much higher if the Langtang is affected.
keyle [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Likely the tourists are better accounted for than the locals. Numbers are likely much higher :(
markus_zhang [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Nepal is popular for Westerners I think. Maybe for religious reasons?
janhaa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
i understand it as 150 dead, with more people missing, of which 47 are americans.
suzzer99 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I feel like I've easily seen more than that get swept away in videos.
segmondy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Way too early to get an accurate count
markus_zhang [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I have watched a few and they look like the four horsemen TBH.
inasio [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Reminded me of the Huascaran avalanche (1970, killed approx 30K people) [0]. I'm surprised this is not also in the thousands of casualties (perhaps it'll get there) [0]
I believe this is how the Hudson Bay was formed, in what must have been quite a sight.
ghastmaster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hyperbole?
>Much of the landform has been shaped by the actions of glaciers and the shrinkage of the bay over long periods of time
This would support your notion. Albeit ridiculous.
>Finally starting in the Late Ordovician and continuing into the Silurian did the gradual regional subsidence of this part of the Canadian Shield form the Hudson Bay Basin
This would not.
I cannot decide whether to laugh, or downvote your comment without more context. That I did some research and learning to decide to comment instead leaves me happy and satisfied that your comment was not completely worthless.
In the future, don't go close to mountains during monsoon season - late May to August end; that period is specifically for Southeast Asia. For the rest of the world, you can find it out.
I read this wasn't due to rain but a glacial collapse. It sounds to me like the additional advice would be that due to a warming climate, avoid being under a glacier at all costs?
defrost [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Down stream of a glacier, in the run off water shed.
As I've heard tell, this was a glacial collapse into and blocking a river, which then built up a head of pressure behind it, bursting to release a hammer blow of river water and debris that travelled a great distance.
Similar things can happen due to landslides into rivers; it depends on the topology of the land, here long narrow valleys carved out by heavy water flows.
The warning being, don't live in a natural "drainpipe".
In mountainous regions that's often not much of an option, there's a lot of vertical sides and valley bottoms.
bamboozled [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It sounds like there may have been some opportunity for warning then? If the thing was more of a "build up" ?
defrost [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sure, if every part of rugged terrain were monitored with sufficient frequency to detect such a change.
That might take some infrastructure to cover everywhere such things can happen (eg: the beds of rivers in Western Australia's Pilbara and Kimberley regions have a high flash flooding risk in the wet season.
madaxe_again [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The debris flow that has just happened doesn’t appear to be a glacial outburst.
Rather, the entire front face of a glacier at high elevation sheared off, likely millions of tonnes of material at least, crashed down a steep runnel, slammed into the opposing slope on the other side of the valley at the bottom, made that partially collapse, dammed the river for several minutes, and then all descended at high speed as the dam failed, with the results we see.
Some reportage is still saying there was an earthquake - there wasn’t - the landslide itself was the source of the seismic waves.
Brilliant analysis! Although china is notoriously bad at reporting earthquake data, I assumed in this case they were open and honest. It made sense that an earthquake would trigger this event. I do not fault anyone for interpreting the data this way. The USGS has been the agency I most trust in the federal government.
USGS is a fact finding organization. They do not regulate. They have been around since 1879. The land surveys they have done made huge impact on society. The reliability of surveys that they have facilitated has made an impact on industrial civilization that few will understand or ever hear about.
metalman [3 hidden]5 mins ago
GLOF, glacial lake outburst flood.
exceptionaly brutal cctv footage from the tibet/nepal border, so many people that there is a tiny chance that perhaps one of them was tossed clear, but of the rest there will be no remains.
other videos shows that the flood "water" is so thick with mud that it is sheering off in sheets and one more shows it ripping out a concrete bridge that then floats away on top.
*disturbing video
HN.zip
For context that's not where the flood happened, there's a massive mountain range in between those vallies reaching over 8000m (Shishapangma).
In earth science there are thousands of worst case scenario models published, but it's hard to actually predict reality.
Looks like a warning siren could have saved some lives. But apparently this was a black swan.
What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.
It usually takes entire icebergs calving off to produce such seismic events and intense monsoons to create such flooding.
It seems that past history (especially recent) will not be a good predictor of future events.
While I'd wait for confirmation about the cause of this specific incident, the point you seem to be ignoring is that, due to climate change, events that would have been considered "black swans" historically will become more and more common, to the point that they are expected to occur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
Rescue operations in Nepal are in good hands, but this is sadly because those same response orgs had to respond to a similarly brutal cloud burst floods back in 2013 [0], 2021 [1] and 2025 [2].
It also shows the very real and brutal effect climate change is already having, and will only get worse.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_North_India_floods
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Uttarakhand_flood
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Kishtwar_district_flash_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Huascar%C3%A1n_debris_ava...
>Much of the landform has been shaped by the actions of glaciers and the shrinkage of the bay over long periods of time
This would support your notion. Albeit ridiculous.
>Finally starting in the Late Ordovician and continuing into the Silurian did the gradual regional subsidence of this part of the Canadian Shield form the Hudson Bay Basin
This would not.
I cannot decide whether to laugh, or downvote your comment without more context. That I did some research and learning to decide to comment instead leaves me happy and satisfied that your comment was not completely worthless.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Bay
As I've heard tell, this was a glacial collapse into and blocking a river, which then built up a head of pressure behind it, bursting to release a hammer blow of river water and debris that travelled a great distance.
Similar things can happen due to landslides into rivers; it depends on the topology of the land, here long narrow valleys carved out by heavy water flows.
The warning being, don't live in a natural "drainpipe".
In mountainous regions that's often not much of an option, there's a lot of vertical sides and valley bottoms.
That might take some infrastructure to cover everywhere such things can happen (eg: the beds of rivers in Western Australia's Pilbara and Kimberley regions have a high flash flooding risk in the wet season.
Rather, the entire front face of a glacier at high elevation sheared off, likely millions of tonnes of material at least, crashed down a steep runnel, slammed into the opposing slope on the other side of the valley at the bottom, made that partially collapse, dammed the river for several minutes, and then all descended at high speed as the dam failed, with the results we see.
Some reportage is still saying there was an earthquake - there wasn’t - the landslide itself was the source of the seismic waves.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000tbwb...
USGS is a fact finding organization. They do not regulate. They have been around since 1879. The land surveys they have done made huge impact on society. The reliability of surveys that they have facilitated has made an impact on industrial civilization that few will understand or ever hear about.
exceptionaly brutal cctv footage from the tibet/nepal border, so many people that there is a tiny chance that perhaps one of them was tossed clear, but of the rest there will be no remains. other videos shows that the flood "water" is so thick with mud that it is sheering off in sheets and one more shows it ripping out a concrete bridge that then floats away on top. *disturbing video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rIVNeDuCF_k
fixed, but some things are better off wrong perhaps