Will glacier collapses become more common – and how devastating are they?

The wall of water slammed into buildings in Gyirong Port (Picture: Social media via Reuters)

The devastating flood that swept away homes and killed at least 359 people in the Himalayas won’t be the last,experts have told Metro.

A giant torrent of water,rocks and ice abruptly smashed through the border between Nepal and the Tibet region of China yesterday.

Footage shows people trying to escape before a wave of mud engulfed buildings within seconds at the Gyirong crossing.

After the flood left behind a 40-mile-long path of destruction,more than 1,000 people are still missing,including British tourists.

What is left of some villages,such as Trishuli,has been covered in mud (Picture: Reuters)

Simon Cook,an environmental scientist at the University of Dundee in Scotland,told Metro yesterday that his team’s preliminary analysis of satellite imagery indicates that an ice avalanche triggered the flooding.

Similar ice-rock avalanches have happened before,but not as deadly as yesterday’s (Picture: AFP)

China and Tibet have not been ‘unaware’ that such an event could happen,Maximillian Van Wyk de Vries,an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge who specialises in natural hazards,said,having spent years understanding how they unfold.

But both were more focused on glacial lake outburst floods,when a dam holding back a glacial lake fails. An ice-rock avalanche is ‘unexpected’.

Still,de Vries adds that it can be difficult to lay the blame for the Nepal-Tibet landslide on climate change,caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

The data,he stresses,is still patchy at best and it’s still too early to rule out other contributing factors.

‘I am sure research will shed more light on this,but for the people and communities impacted,the question of whether climate change was a contributing factor is somewhat secondary,’ de Vries says.

‘We will have to contend with these events whatever the answer to that question is.’

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