Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022

Fingers crossed it doesn't burn your house down when your out and about. At least put it somewhere outside.

It’s very different to visit a risk area as a tourist. Your chances of being buried are slim for a particle week. But for the people living there every day, the statistics compound. For a long enough period it’s almost guaranteed you will suffer. In the case of the downhill villages in Nepal, everyone knew those lakes would eventually burst , and in a matter of a few years. To continue building and living in those areas was completely reckless and I want to believe that anywhere in Europe they would have evacuated such villages decades before disaster.

We can increase them, it's just really hard to decrease them which is why scientists have been telling us to stop increasing the CO2 levels for about a century.

Voting is in many parts manipulated or gerrymandered... feature and for it to work we'd need a lot of work.

So not the best metric for what majority of people want.

Also the wants are manufactured in many parts.

Reminds me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave

So I don't think it'a new thing, but maybe it's getting worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

Baudrillard restated, as a cause rather than an effect.

Yes, it's awesome and exactly what I had in mind.

The century of the self must be recommended also.

> This will continue till we wisen up and elect the right people, select the right people.

This is part of the problem:

The problem is not necessarily democracy, but rather the insight the lack of bandwidth in voting ballots. A few bits every 4 years or whatever? Contrast this with the rate of modification in the law of a jurisdiction. Define the "democratic grade" as the ratio of binding democratic input in bits/per year to the changes in the binding law in bits/per year.

The problems aren't the concepts of democracy, but that humanity was sold a muzzle with a nameplate stating "democracy".

One may argue that it was necessary in the era where most democracies were initiated, until large enough fractions of the population become educated, but justified or not, its hard to defend today.

Every time you spread the message that we just need to "vote right" you too are in a novel way a part of the problem.

Are there "right people"? Or does power corrupt, and your cozy wish is just not realistic? Looking at local politics, I see misuse of power and on all sides. Left, right, middle. Nobody can be trusted.

People live there already. How do you propose to move them and support them in the place you moved them to? Please don't make me break out the Aquaman joke.

What does that concretely actually mean?

There are only a handful of areas on the planet without known disaster exposure risk. Maybe zero, really.

> Okay, but isn't it likely that the outcome of those scientific investigations will be that the Himalayan foothills should not be inhabited at all, except maybe a couple of places

Yes and that is broadly the safe option. One can build on geological stable high grounds. They are rather and more difficult to build on. We know what happens when we don't.

> Sure, politicians and contractors could do better

It's not mistake of the "oops a typo" variety.

They are knowingly making a freakton of money by endangering the people who ought to know better. I agree sometimes the poor might not have viable alternatives that they can fund with their own bank balance but it seems this is where the governments should step in to fund alternatives. But why do that when there is easy money to be made.

Its a "detect characteristic vibrations" - send to starlink? or if thats the problem- use the river itself and transmit the warning with the speed of sound through water.. by just having some underwater bell upstream. Go full lowtech, but at the risk of no warning if the river is dry at glacier dam break.

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.

Anticipation is one thing, effective response in the seconds before disaster strikes is quite another thing. This might not have been an absolute black swan, but even with foresight it is challenging in the extreme to avoid risk.

I've been reviewing what coverage I can find of the present event in Nepal/China, in context with Section 5.1, "Comprehensive approach to disaster risk management", of TFA.

It seems that what would be required would be:

- Active surveillance of glacial lake formation.

- Active mitigation of glacial lakes, reducing risk.

- Warning and response infrastructure, procedures, and protocols along the likly flood path.

From video of what I presume are among the worst-hit areas (see: <https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>), there appear to have been at best a few seconds of warning. Very robust structures are demolished virtually instantly. Even had people been sheltering within those structures, or headed up-slope above the water flow, either structural integrity would prove insufficient, or response time inadequate to reach a safe elevation above the debris flow. The latter problem is compounded by what appears to be an extraordinarily strong air blast (likely hurricane-strength or greater) as well as massive amounts of airborne debris, much of it rock.

Terrain is severely constrained in the region, and the only buildable regions are in river valleys themselves. The Gyirong Port border crossing is located deep within a river channel, and despite robust construction simply could not survive the event.

See:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyirong_Port> (Wikipedia article on the port.)

Map / satellite view: <https://www.google.com/maps/@28.2792579,85.3752907,1341m/dat...>

(Take a few minutes to examine the region around the port itself ... there are several communities and businesses all well within the disaster zone, and I suspect that obliteration to those matches or exceeds what was captured on video at the crossing itself.)

From the first video at this Twitter post, a camera situated roughly 20m above the base terrain did not survive the event (though it transmitted for roughly a minute).

A second camera (I believe near the same location) shows similarly catastrophic damage, and no chance for anyone at base level to climb to a safe elevation before being overtaken by the debris flow.

Wikipedia notes "Floodwaters reached settlements as high as 270 feet (80 m) above the river level", citing <https://english.onlinekhabar.com/rasuwa-flood-in-pictures.ht...>.

Climbing that far would require 4--8 minutes for even a highly-fit person. Available response time in the videos I've seen is on the order of 1--2 minutes. Anyone beginning within the debris zone is already walking dead.

As the Cowboy Junkies said:

  But if there's on thing in my life
  That these years have taught
  It's that you can always see it coming
  But you can never stop it

Anticipation isn't sufficient. Other than entirely abandoning such locations during all periods of high risk, loss of life is likely, and catastrophic property and infrastructure damage inevitable.

<https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>

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.

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.

You just pushed me into a rabbit hole called the Zanclean megaflood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood

The Missoula Floods in the northwestern US were a similar sort of event, though I'm not sure how the scale compares.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods

It is supposed that such an event happened, when the land between continental Europe and England got flooded. This was as well during a warmer period when glacier melted. And there was human population on that land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

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.

This.

You could probably count 100+ people in the death zone of the border crossing video alone. The final death toll will be terrible, with most never found.

I feel like I've easily seen more than that get swept away in videos.

Zero chance the actual death count is sub-1000

Way too early to get an accurate count

Mountaineering.

For indians, you also have the religious aspect because the immigration center you go to to visit Mt Kailash is there.

That immigration building was the white one that got completely shredded in the popular video going around.

Source?

I remember them referencing global cooling on science Friday on NPR as late as 2005

Actual cooling was from industrial emissions, but that was over by the 1970s. It being something to panic about at that point was a media amplification or a contrarian position, precisely because it was contrarian, not representative of scientific opinion at the time.

That burden is on you since you placed a blame on the people "ignoring" the scientists. You should have understood how reliable these warnings are before blaming people for ignoring them...

Since you don't have them, I have to suppose you just like being on a high horse...

The rivers in that area are pretty small. You would have to block them for days before there is a risk of a massive flash flood.

From what I've understood, the collapsing glacier either contained enough liquid water or melted enough from the impact that it continued flowing downstream. It covered ~20 horizontal kilometers in about 7 minutes before hitting the border crossing.

It sounds like there may have been some opportunity for warning then? If the thing was more of a "build up" ?