Excerpts:

On the morning of Aug. 26, an entire glacier-covered mountainside in northern Nepal collapsed. Within minutes, a towering, churning wall of mud, rock and water engulfed villages in the valley of the Bhotekoshi River along the border between Nepal and Tibet. For many of those in its path, there was little time to escape. At least 580 people are dead; more than 1,900 people remain missing. The toll is expected to rise in the coming days.

The several-story-high mass coming out of nowhere to explode buildings and snap bridges was not like the floods or avalanches well known in this region. It was more like a bomb, some said.

This is a sign of a new, disorienting danger in cold mountain zones: the rapid destabilization of glaciers and permafrost that can remake entire landscapes in the blink of an eye. The processes leading to these cascading failures are complex, but the hidden hand behind them is human-caused climate change. Our fossil fuel burning is pulling down the world’s highest peaks.

Worldwide, climate change is causing glaciers to disappear at an accelerating rate. Few places are as vulnerable as the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau, where the rate of glacier ice loss has doubled since 2000. As those frozen water towers dwindle, the two billion people downstream who depend on the Brahmaputra, Indus and other great rivers of Asia will have less water for drinking, farming and hydroelectricity in decades to come. More people will also be exposed to glacial lake outburst floods, a dangerous phenomenon triggered when glacial melt fills basins and overwhelms dams.

Fifteen years ago, my reporting focused on those daunting but largely anticipated twin impacts of vanishing ice. I saw villages in north India abandoned as receding glaciers led to extreme drought. I heard farmers on the Tibetan Plateau describe their shock at seeing once reliable springs dry up. People in Nepal and Bhutan described their fear of losing their homes and their lives in glacial floods.

Now something else is coming into view: Like termites gnawing on a house’s framing, rising air temperatures seem to be chewing away at the ice and permafrost holding slopes together at high elevations.

In April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck northern Nepal, shaking loose a nearly seven-foot-thick mass of snow, ice and rock from the southern face of Langtang Lirung that killed more than 300 people including more than 100 whose bodies were never recovered. In 2024, researchers concluded that climate change had likely made the tremor-induced avalanche more deadly.

A slope on the north face of that very same mountain has just collapsed, a very likely sign it is further buckling under the weight of climate change. It’s far from the only one.

In 2016, two glaciers in the Aru mountains of western Tibet spontaneously crumbled into fast-moving ice avalanches — highly unusual events that came in quick succession, just two months apart. The first one killed nine shepherds and coated three square miles with debris. The north face of Ronti Peak in Uttarakhand, India, broke off in 2021, sending a surge of pulverized ice and rocky debris downriver through the district of Chamoli. More than 200 people were killed or missing and two large hydropower plants were damaged.

The risks extend beyond the Himalaya. In 2022, following a period of anomalously warm weather, a permafrost-buttressed glacier in Italy’s Dolomites collapsed and killed 11 mountaineers. In May 2025, a rock-ice collapse buried the village of Blatten in Switzerland after its 300 residents had been safely evacuated. Geologists are now closely watching a similarly unstable rock face that threatens another Swiss village.

As rescue and recovery efforts unfold in the days ahead, one question we should consider is how many other mountains might be quietly coming undone. In a recent post analyzing the disaster, Bethan Davies, a glacial geologist at Newcastle University, warned that in the years ahead “we should expect to continue to experience such catastrophic events.” A study she co-authored documents how glacier ice loss in Nepal’s Langtang region has been speeding up in recent decades. Many glaciers are shrinking and fragmenting at a geologically breakneck pace, leaving exposed dark rock that has been insulated for millenniums.

We are accustomed to thinking of mountains — especially the Himalaya, which means “abode of snows” in Sanskrit — as fixed, timeless, immovable, permanent. The disaster in Nepal is the latest disturbing sign that mountains are fragile. The speed with which humans are warming the world is pulling them apart at the seams. Even mountain dwellers who have learned, across generations, to adapt to the vagaries of monsoon rains, periodic landslides, spring and summer floods and winter avalanches have now been dragged into alien terrain, without ever having moved.

In the minutes before this week’s deluge struck and tore away the life he and others had known, a survivor downstream of the border said he heard what sounded like a “thunderclap” — the sound of one of the planet’s tallest mountains falling. This new warning alarm of climate breakdown is loud and terrible enough to echo around the world — if we choose to hear it.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/opinion/nepal-flood-glacier-melt-climate-change.html

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current conditions are within Holocene variability.

check out this AI Summary of the situation...nice try though...

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AI Overview
Yes, without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, Earth's slow orbital shifts would have continued a natural multi-millennial global cooling trend that started roughly 6,000 years ago.

The Natural Cooling Trend
Orbital Forcing: Subtle changes in Earth's axial tilt and orbit around the sun—known as Milankovitch cycles—gradually reduce the amount of summer sunlight reaching the Northern Hemisphere over thousands of years.

Past Cooling: Proxy records from ocean sediments, tree rings, and ice cores show that global temperatures peaked during the early-to-mid Holocene (the Holocene Climatic Optimum) and then began a slow, steady cooling phase at a rate of roughly 0.1°C per 1,000 years.

Pre-Industrial State: This natural descent brought about cooler centuries like the Little Ice Age and would have slowly steered the planet toward the next glacial period over the next several thousand years.

Human Disruption
Overwhelming Cycles: Human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have completely reversed this subtle, long-term natural cooling curve.

Current Trajectory: Instead of continuing the gradual orbital decline into cooler conditions, industrial activity has warmed the planet by roughly 1°C over the past century and a half, entirely masking the Earth's natural astronomical cooling cycle
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all about the impact of anthropogenically caused global warming that led to the catastrophe in Nepal/Tibet...again, per well researched Climate Studies, we should be in the midst of a normal Holocene global cooling period...but temperatures are rising rapidly, while glaciers are receding...rather than increasing.

Happened so far in Holocene. I don’t speculate as you did. Science is based on evidences. Evidences are events that already happened.

what has happened in past Holocene periods"?...unlike you, I deal in facts...known physical processes...and Data.

Link: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

In the case of CO2, that means more fertilizers. I wish CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere stay at 1000 ppm. But I know the carbon cycle of nature law won’t allow it.

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Very glad to see she is being successful…even if she’s gone off the rails a bit.

A very nice kid.

Why you keep picking Losers to follow is a mystery in itself....

Remember the American Physical Society, as well as the leading Physicists from 196 countries all agree with anthropogenic Global Warming...which leads to Climate Change...and its effects are becoming more and more obvious.


Link: https://greatwhitecon.info/2024/04/chris-martz-shouldve-gone-to-specsavers/

Dr. Risch had been debunked.

also has a hard time figuring out how airports work...

Don't be an academic snob. Prisoners have passed the bar by doing self-study at the prison library.

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your obsession with HR, read what his peers at Yale and the Journal of Epidemiology have to say about him...then consider that the entire world's experts in both fields have decided...they can't all be wrong...and you, a total non-expert, be right...it's not logical, to use your parlance.

You are simply waaayyy behind if you are mentioning his peers and other epidemiologists, because they criticized ONLY his article and initial advocacy of HCQ+, not his thorough research paper. As he pointed out in his paper, they referred ONLY to studies that were never conducted properly, which I've spelled out numerous times why they were faulty.

You seem to think a mere layman such as myself can't read what Dr. Risch wrote, can't listen to what Dr. Fareed said, compare that to what your hero the Great Fauchino said, and still comprehend the subject. You would be mistaken. When it comes to whether HCQ+ worked, I can see that ALL credible observational trials showed it worked, every study "discrediting" it wasn't performed properly, and come to the obvious conclusion the medical community didn't use the right logic in saying it didn't work. You don't have to be a medical expert to use basic logic here.

are responsible for protecting hundreds of millions in the midst of a raging pandemic don't have time for Incompetents...sorry about that. Btw, there was, and is, no way I'm wasting time on Dr. Risch's failure...but I expect you to bring this up, ad infinitum...;-)

He INITIALLY cited one flawed study in his Newsweek article, for which in his paper he admitted it wasn't valid. However, for the rest of his paper he used ONLY credible data that no one has disputed. Even your hero the Great Fauchino never said the data wasn't accurate; he just didn't accept it due to his flawed personal medical philosophy of not accepting observational trials as valid - again, a philosophy that is NOT shared by the rest of the medical research community. (Shouldn't that in itself at least give you some pause?)

Why you continually get facts wrong and use poor logic on this subject is beyond me. As long as you keep bringing up tired and discredited talking points on this subject and as long as you continue to be wrong, I'm going to correct you, as uncorrectable as you are.

standing on the issue of Climate Change...and Chris Martz has definitely been debunked with data from the rest of the Climate Science community.

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/16/hydroxychloroquine-studies-show-drug-is-not-effective-early-treatment-mild-covid-19/

How many times are you going to keep putting up links to studies that were not conducted properly?

Ty, I think this goes beyond a lack of ability to use basic logic by this point. I really, really think you have some serious cognitive issues you need to get addressed.

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And the science of deteriorating permafrost is just liberal malarkey?

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leading physicists in this country... all agree on anthropogenic global warming, which causes Climate Change...and obviously, they are not all "Democrats" ;-)

NOTE:...China and India are ramping up their nuclear power programs, with China having 200 plants in various stages of their 'pipeline'

Regardless of what humans do.

You've even lost your hero Bill Gates on thean made climate change catastrophe. Focus on AI killing us all.