Overview
- A massive flood with landslides and rock-ice flows struck the Nepal–China (Tibet) border valley on Wednesday, August 26, sweeping away homes, bridges and power facilities and leaving about 362 people dead with more than 1,400 still missing.
- University of Tokyo and commercial satellite imagery identify a large upstream glacier collapse as the likely trigger, and the US Geological Survey recorded M5.2-equivalent ground shaking that it said was caused by the ice collapse rather than a tectonic quake.
- Search-and-rescue teams from China and Nepal have been deployed and foreign missions are involved, but operations are hampered by severed communications, remote terrain, forecasts of further rain and the risk of secondary landslides and floods.
- Tourists and foreign nationals are among the missing, with the Japanese Embassy reporting five Japanese people uncontactable and officials saying hundreds of foreigners may be affected along pilgrimage and tourist routes.
- The disaster echoes prior glacier-lake breaches in the region and has prompted urgent investigations into local ice dynamics and the role of warming-driven glacier change for sudden, hard-to-predict outburst floods.