Climate change is leading to conditions that can destabilise high-mountain rock and ice, strengthening prospects for disasters such as this week’s Himalayan flood along the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet that killed 165, scientists say.
While experts caution against describing climate change as the sole, immediate trigger for Wednesday’s collapse, they say that rising temperatures and melting glaciers probably played a role in the disaster. Warming can reduce ice support on steep slopes, boost meltwater, and change patterns of freezing, thawing and rainfall, which can weaken mountainsides and make large collapses more likely in some spots, Cox added.
“Climate change is generating conditions that can destabilise high-mountain rock and ice,” said Simon Cox, chief scientist at the Mountains to Sea programme at Earth Sciences New Zealand. Wednesday’s disaster could be a classic example of a “compound event”, said Benjamin Horton, dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong. That happens when an earthquake interacts with climate-driven changes, such as glacier loss, thawing permafrost, and slope instability, to “create a more complex and damaging disaster than would occur from any one factor alone”, he added.
