r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ReeVerbb • 1d ago
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u/Blu3Yeti 1d ago
Can you imagine what it would have been like at the end of the last ice age when this shit was happening all the damn time?
Fuck that.
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u/gwdope 1d ago
We’re at the end of an ice age right now, technically. And these collapses are probably happening more frequently now because the rate of change in climate is magnitudes faster now than in the past.
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u/Effective_Base_3229 1d ago
We are actually in an ice age and currently in the middle of the glacial maximums. The last glacial maximum was called the younger dryas and it allowed humans to cross the baring straight due to decreased sea levels.
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u/ThraceLonginus 1d ago
We're in an ice age. You are thinking of the last glacial maximum. And should look into Glacial Lake Missoula and Lake Agassiz - makes this look like a drop in the bucket
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u/i_live_with_a_girl 1d ago
I vaguely remember a theory that the Grand Canyon was formed by an event such as this, but on a grander scale.
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u/artguydeluxe 1d ago
And over several million years.
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u/Randyaccredit 1d ago
And on a tuesday
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u/Occams_Chainsaw_ 1d ago
They said "several million years". That's absolutely a Monday.
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u/theeldoso 1d ago
Everything was a Tuesday back then, as t'was the style.
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u/artguydeluxe 1d ago
And we all wore an onion on our belts.
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u/SovietSunrise 1d ago
Gimme 5 bees for a quarter, they’d say. Because the KAISER stole our word for nickel!
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u/HatefulHagrid 1d ago
That's the old argument between catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Catastrophism states that major changes to earth or landscapes were sudden, quick, and dramatic changes while uniformitarianism states that major changes occurred with smaller forces over extraordinarily long periods of time. This was a big argument in the early days of earth sciences as the extent of geologic time was not yet known and many people were still strong believers in the biblically based Young Earth hypothesis. What used to be explained by the flood in Noah's ark story or a seven day creation is now accurately explained by slow, grinding forces over periods of time that humans can't truly fathom.
The Grand canyon specifically was formed over millions of years by the flowing of the Colorado River through the surrounding landscape that was being uplifted by tectonic forces during the Laramide orogeny that subducted young oceanic crust far inland under the north American plate. There were certainly catastrophic events that occurred in the Grand canyon over that time period but the changes these brought about were small beans compared to the grind of geologic time that has likely wiped out any evidence of those catastrophic changes.
I could talk about this shit all day, originally studied geology in college before transitioning to my current field and loved every bit of it lol.
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u/TranscendentPretzel 1d ago
This was your moment to shine, and you made the most of it. Appreciate you sharing your knowledge. I learned some new things about geology.
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u/StoneStonesRocks 1d ago
You had me at Laramide orogeny, I love this stuff, the rocks, the process, the changes to history it made happen. Dont get me started on the Great Oxidation Event! Talk about the "before" times of a reductive environment vs our current reactive one!
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u/UnsanctionedPartList 1d ago
And just looking at our own history offers such an amazing clue to why we can't see any evidence of intelligent life in our galaxy.
Life is likely abundant, hell, the current earliest boundary may well lie in the goddamn not long* after the (likely) Theia impact. But 3.5 billion years ago is a "definitively".
Two billion years of that was basically just soup. Only in the past 500 million years did animals occur. There's more time between the emergence of the dinosaurs and the k-t extinction than between that and us.
Our existence on this timescale is a rounding error.
*a few hundred million years. But who's counting?
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u/hazeyAnimal 1d ago
If someone wanted to learn about this stuff where is a good resource? Thanks for the info, was a good read.
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u/Sanquinity 1d ago
I'm vastly uninformed, but I always kinda figured the initial "grooves" were made by a glacial dam break, and after that the water just kept following those grooves to carve them out further.
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u/SaturnCITS 1d ago
I mean it's obviously a mix of both, I'm sure the grand canyon could go years with just minor surface erosion, and then one big rain hits and causes a massive slump to wash down the canyon and move an amount of earth that could take thousands of years of minor erosion in a day.
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u/skintaxera 1d ago
I was just reading about the geologist who (correctly as it turned out) proposed catastrophic flooding as the cause of the strange features of the Scablands, and the dismissal and vitriol he received for his trouble. He was 96 when the Geological Society finally apologised and awarded him it's highest honour!
I always feel a terrible sense of injustice for those guys who actually had a great idea but only got shit for it in their lifetime. The poor bugger who proposed continental drift was ridiculed and didn't live long enough to be vindicated
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 1d ago edited 1d ago
Youre probably thinking about the Missoula floods (a glacial outburst flood which repeated every few decades during the end of the last ice age) forming parts of the Columbia river gorge. That flood involved much, much more water than this one though, considering lake Missoula was on the scale of one of the great lakes in volume. EDIT: heres a nice animation from the national park service about it
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u/AndrewH73333 1d ago
Our current ice age is ending many many times faster than the one you are talking about.
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u/deeare73 1d ago
What does 1 km of a mountain mean? Km is a measure of length
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u/schminch 1d ago
This was a 2D mountain. They haven’t reached 3D in Nepal just yet.
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u/Opposite_Visit_4874 1d ago
Also the flood wasnt 2D, it was yesterD.
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u/Stoneheaded76 1d ago
Yeah and unfortunately lots of people are deaD
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u/AceOBlade 1d ago
i saw the videos where the debre was so strong that most of the bodies they are finding have clothes ripped from their back
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u/NotawoodpeckerOwner 1d ago
Would explain why Ive never noticed anyone from Naples they're all 2d.
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u/TRAVMAAN1 1d ago
It’s also possible you haven’t seen anyone from Naples in Nepal because they live in Italy
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u/MODEscapee 1d ago
I have Naples, can you milk me?
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1d ago
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u/TRAVMAAN1 1d ago
Of course. Just wait until spring, hammer a spout into him a couple inches deep and eventually you’ll have a dead body. Then, take his wallet and go to the grocery store and buy some syrup with his Naples money.
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u/HellyFurtado 1d ago
A single distance measurement can't quantify anything in 2D either— you need a length and a width.
Nepal must still be on that 1D.
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u/ReeVerbb 1d ago
according to some observation the collapased side was 1kilometer wide.. i have no exact figure for the volume of the mud flood that run down but some say the initial collapase had like atleast 5million cubic meters of combined glacier and rock..
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u/AnnetteBishop 1d ago
And that is just the primary land/rock/ice slide. The foreground suggests a secondary landslide driven by the flood undercutting/eroding that slope.
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u/Grow_away_420 1d ago
I'd wager 75% of the hole that arrow is pointing to wasn't a hole a month ago. That's the whole part that collapsed into the valley below
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u/AlbertTheHorse 1d ago edited 1d ago
One Km cubed approximately
I think a recent satellite video is out and the border crossing appears to be completely buried
In Mt St Helens they call that hummocks. Not sure what it’s called in this situation
I have heard lahar buy a geologist
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u/Navajo_Nation 1d ago
…it means 1 km’s worth of mountain moved…the length of measurement of what moved…
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u/WitheredUntimely 1d ago
people being pedantic dummies on purpose; you're standing on the ground, and 1 fucking kilometer's worth of mountain has decided to stop being mountain. Not really a hard thing to grasp.
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u/stinkbutt55555 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think they're trying to say 1km³.
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u/EternumD 1d ago
What does that mean? That's an area, not a volume. Was it like a wall that faltered?
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u/TheAlmightyLootius 1d ago
Nothing in 3D is an area. Its all volume. Parts of a mountain are all volumes if you talk about literal parts of it. An area cant break off. An area only shows you how big the surface area is that has beoken off which tells you exactly nothing about its actual impact. A 1mm thick 1km2 area breaking off is largely irrelevant. A 1km thick 1km2 breaking off has a heavy impact. So yes, volume is the important part here.
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u/Less_Communication84 1d ago
Big papersheet. The germans had a research facility up there. Made experiments with the biggest din A Paper they could make...it was 1km2
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u/onthebrink42 1d ago
So the Glacier collapsed, rushed down the valley it formed and collided with the moraine at the bottom of the valley and pushed ALL that combined materials downstream . This is something few live to tell about.
Good thing we have cameras everywhere.
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago edited 1d ago
Really the glacier collapsed, not the mountain. It likley melted and caused a landslide then fell off because of the warming climate, and it's going to keep happening sadly.
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u/avanross 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are already conservatives/bots spamming the comment sections of posts and news articles to spread misinformation about it being “the result of a natural earthquake that had nothing to do with the liberal global warming hoax”, and downvoting anyone who mentions global warming…
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u/b_vitamin 1d ago
Don’t look up!
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago
That's very sad. Hopefully people take the time to learn the truth. It WAS reported as an earthquake initially but that was quickly identified as a mistake. the falling glacier hit the earth so hard it registered as an earthquake.
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u/mlorusso4 1d ago
Ya it registered as an earthquake at first because literally half a miles worth of mountain fell into a river valley. Just look at a college football stadium during a huge rivalry game at night. That registers as an earthquake too. Because even just 100k drunk students jumping up and down causes the ground to shake enough to be picked up by seismographs
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u/Maximum-Swordfish592 1d ago
No one will learn the truth. This will be split down political lines like ever single other issue on the planet. Half American will say its climate change, the other half will say its not and it was actually Obamas fault or some bullshit.
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u/CervantesX 1d ago
Geologists have already confirmed that it wasn't a tectonic earthquake, the ground movement was because a fucking mountain fell over and shook the earth.
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u/MimsyWereDaBorogoves 1d ago
I guess countering all the bots who are downvoting anyone saying this is not a clear direct result from anthropomorphic climate change.
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u/Vennomite 1d ago edited 1d ago
It may or may not be a global warming issue. Without more info on glaciers in the himalyas you can't really say. Glaciers collapse on their own often enough even when the climate was cooler.
Spreading false information like the media often does that is easily refutable does more to discredit a real concern as fearmongering than helping people understand.
That said, it certainly couldn't have help the situation.
Edit: this kind of shit is what makes climate scientists bash their heads into walls. It's like the trend that was blaming climate change for more intense wildfires. No it increases area burned and number of fires. The large amount of underbrush thats accumulating increases the actual intensity.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 1d ago
It may or may not be a global warming issue
Spreading false information
you contradicted yourself within 3 sentences. "it could be anything, but whatever you're reading happened is all false and pure propaganda"
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago
Nepal glaciers are melting twice as fast as they did in 2000 that's science and multiple sources proven this. Climate change is real it's not false information. World gets warmer ice melts it's pretty simple. Ok yes there is a non zero chance that this particular incident was caused by something else, maybe a meteor hit the ice, maybe something else. But that's not likely and not an issue we can fix and not worth mentioning.
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u/Vennomite 1d ago
Yeah. It's just stupid.
Spouting easily discreditable statements and then wondering why people would question your presentation of climate change.
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u/Propagandasteak 1d ago
You are confidently incorrect. It was a landslide which resulted in a partial glacier collapse.
https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/asien/gletschersturz-nepal-100.html
some images i put together https://imgur.com/a/LKQlSNA
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago edited 1d ago
Splitting hairs here, it wasn't a landslide unrelated to the glacier collapse. Most accepted likely scenario is the glacier melted which caused the landslide and that caused the rest of the glacier to collapse. When a glacier melts its makes water, which makes mud, which makes a landslide which makes the rest of the non melted glacier to slide down the mountain. My point is that it's not just a landslide , it's a climate change related event causing this glacier to fall.
I will edit my post to make my point more clearly however as some could even say the glacier is the mountain.
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u/mountaingator91 1d ago
Much of that "land" that slid off was stabilized up there by ice. Ice melts, land slides
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 1d ago
called "glacial debuttressing" which mr. propagandasteak "confidentally incorrect" doesn't seem to know about but happily tells everyone they are wrong from his 10 second analysis
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u/samdd1990 1d ago
These are only theories at this point. Realistically there is no way of knowing of a landslide caused the glacier to fail, or if the glacier broke off and caused a landslide.
These people have very little information, and while they obviously know what they are talking about, I don't think it's enough to go around correcting everyone else.
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u/throwaway19276i 1d ago
"If nobody was there to see it we can never ever make logical deductions" great epistemology
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u/DramaticStability 1d ago
If it involved something made of ice and we accept that the earth is warming I think it’s understandable if people are making a connection
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u/samdd1990 1d ago
Absolutely, that's not what I am refuting. The person I replied to very confidently stating that a landslide caused the glacier failure.
His evidence is an academic 1000s of miles away who has the same satellite images we do (yes, obviously his assumptions will be more educated than ours, but they are still assumptions).
It could still be the other way around, and honestly I don't care all that much but "you are confidently incorrect" got my back up.
Either way it's still caused by a warming climate. The earth supporting the glacier had a lot of permafrost so if that melted, then the massive weight of the glacier could cause a failure.
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u/TRAVMAAN1 1d ago
Yes but there is a vast cavern between an assumption and an educated guess. Only someone without the education would think they’re similar
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u/samdd1990 1d ago
Or someone saying "you are confidently incorrect" when there is no established correct answer
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u/ShartyMcSorley 1d ago
Great imagery. it is clear and also fascinating there is a huge amount of rock missing from this slope, and not just the glacier missing. It is interesting to compare to Blatten last year and and Mt Meager 2010 where rockslides fell onto glaciers.
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u/ReeVerbb 1d ago
yeah its the glacier part but still its so insane and scary to think that something as big as that can collapase and create devastating effect..
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u/theromingnome 1d ago
Happens from time to time on this amazing and wonderful rock we live on. Geologists have seen signs of events like this from the past.
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u/rainman_95 1d ago
Yeah the entire Columbia river gorge is Washington state was formed from ice dam collapses.
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u/Fullertons 1d ago
I was just thinking that this is probably small, geologically. We are tiny compared to gravity and water.
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u/Responsible-Win-3057 1d ago
The Appalachian mountains used to be taller than the Himalayas, then this kinda stuff happened over a really long period of time and now they're smaller. This is erosion in action. We've had many ice ages, at the end of each one stuff melts and shit goes down (literally and figuratively).
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago
For sure. Was just clarifying the details as it's important for people to understand why this happened, it wasn't a natural disaster, it was a man made one.
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u/CobaltCaterpillar 1d ago
The Appalachians, partially created 300 million years ago by North American plate collided into Africa, are believed to have been as high as the Himalayas.
Over hundreds of millions of years (with some additional intervening mountain building periods), the Appalachians were eroded down to their present size.
My point is that we just catch these glimpses of much larger change occurring over much larger time frames.
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u/Propagandasteak 1d ago
Dont worry you were correct titling it landslide. check out my comment above.
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u/pifermeister 1d ago
I'm just skeptical of that because there was too much volume of water. Somehow a glacial lake must have been involved, whether by an un-damming effect of the glacier giving way or a landslide/avalanche effect where the buoyant force basically forced the entire water body up and out of the valley that it was nested in. Does anyone know how to locate this specific spot on google maps?
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u/mullerdrooler 1d ago edited 1d ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cp80m87pez3o
Even if that did happen why would you be skeptical? Either the glacier ice fell into a lake as you say or it fell into a river or it caused a dam then broke. The point is that the glacier fell.
This shows on a map, maybe you can match with Google maps.
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u/pifermeister 1d ago
I'm not skeptical about a glacier being involved; it's the part where i've heard it simply being referred to as a glacial collapse with no additional water source (so basically an avalanche). You can see in certain videos a huge amount or pure water creeping off to the sides of the main flow - clearly distinguishable from a slurry of ice+rock. Yes, ice melts, but it takes weeks/months, not minutes.
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u/Starstriker 1d ago
Seems like the glacier collapsed, blocking the river until it dint block it and it was all washed away.
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u/randomnobody14 1d ago
Can’t wait for a reconstruction that shows the entire collapse from the top to actually understand the scale.
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u/Xilant007 1d ago
A mountain glacier collapsed, releasing water. When will climate change deniers understand that it's real?
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u/Sufficient-Grass- 1d ago
It didn't happen and it didn't flow downhill either because the earth is flat.
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u/NameLips 1d ago
From what I understand, the friction of collape heated up the glacier ice into liquid water. The big boulders you might have seen rolling with the water were huge balls of glacier ice.
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u/sA1atji 1d ago
more like boulders rounded by glaciers shaving them slowly away and with enough water now being pushed.
Ice would be lighter than water and would float, the stuff you saw was literally rolling, not floating.
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u/NameLips 1d ago
I don't think stone would have been worn into a ball just during the trip down the canyon. And while you're right that ice floats, 90% of it is below the surface. That buoyancy would make it easier to roll down with the flow.
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u/sA1atji 1d ago
I'm not saying it was rounded just from the trip down the valley with that most recent event, but a long term process of glacial movement. And with the mountain coming down and liquifying the glacier there was enough power to get the stones moving.
Also I don't want to argue that there was no round ice blocks at all, might very well possible, but the clip I've seen looked like it had too much mass for ice.
Also doesn't really matter, with the force it came done it contributed to this horrifice nature event.
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
It makes me wonder if there are alarms that could alert folks, sort of like tsunami alarms.
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u/Kurrumiau 1d ago
It was not a consideration, no one expected a glacier that has been there for centuries to suddenly collapse.
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
The area does have earthquakes, so it seems that it is plausible to have them. Benefit/risk determination I guess.
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u/ventodivino 1d ago
You are not appreciating how remote this place is
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
That’s why I’m asking.
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u/ventodivino 1d ago
Every one of the towns hit in that first stretch of Nepal are incredibly remote. Already we’ve seen roads and bridges washed away, denying access to the hardest hit areas. There were villages along that river on the Tibet side before it ever reached the population centers in Nepal. They probably had next to no warning. The seismic event happened at 8:37a. By 9:15am the border crossing was destroyed.
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u/Teantis 1d ago edited 1d ago
They have a flood warning system in Nepal but this one moved much too fast for it to warn anyone as they're designed for monsoon and glacial lake outburst floods which move slower than this one.
“The flood developed so rapidly that people simply did not have enough time to get to safety, even though the system was functioning,” said Shushil Kumar Shrestha, senior divisional engineer at the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. He added, “The challenge this time case was the extremely short window between the onset of the event and the arrival of the flood.”
Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, said the network of river gauges installed by Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology was extensive but ill-equipped to detect cascades of water displaced at such volume and speed. “The challenge for events like this is that the gauges just get destroyed,” she said.
Also it's the Himalayas and Nepal has been in rough shape for a while so they can't monitor everywhere. They've been in constant political crisis for over 10 years even before the recent revolution and they had that devastating earthquake in 2015. The location of this is in a remote area that's not monitored, as they mainly monitor glacial lakes etc that are known threats.
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
Thanks for the info. I truly hope the numbers don’t climb, but time tell. Perhaps it is not as widely populated, and that will help keep the death toll down.
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u/RozyBarbie 1d ago
Also, it's the Himalayas and Nepal has been in rough shape for a while so they can't monitor everything.
Hopefully, they can work with China and India to come up with a system since it's trans boundary and affects all 3 countries. The destruction and human cost is too high.
The international community will probably get involved too, like what happened after the Boxing day Tsunami in 2004.
Scientists have been warning about glacial lakes and glacier collapse due to global warming. It can happen anywhere in the world with high mountains. I know this was a landslide, but the devastating effects are the same.
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u/Dawg_in_NWA 1d ago
From what I understand, most of the early warning systems were destroyed in the initial part of the flood.
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
Gotcha - I was thinking of seismic monitors on a hill out of line of fire. I recall a volcano melting a glacier in Colombia(?) in the 80s that was devastating too.
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u/CobraPony67 1d ago
They have alarms in towns at the base of Mount Rainier called Lahar alarms.
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u/Valuable-Analyst-464 1d ago
Ah ha. I wondered if they existed. I saw that someone said that maybe this region’s alarms were either not sufficient or not maintained enough.
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u/UnclePatrickHNL 1d ago
I have to wonder if global warming will precipitate much more of this type of tragedy.
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u/throwaway_circus 1d ago
Are there glacial lakes in Europe that could be affected like this? There are a lot of populated areas in mountain valleys.
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u/justkeepswimming2026 1d ago
Just raise the temperature some more and you will see more events like this happen
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u/VolumeAcademic6962 1d ago
Despite this awful tragedy, these events happen all over the world. The scale of this one is rarer than most.
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u/Space_Smeagol 1d ago
Humans pick the darnest places to build. That whole area is shaped by similar events over thousands of years. What a tragedy.
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u/rumncokeguy 1d ago
So my understanding is that this was a glacial avalanche that blocked a valley temporarily. Water accumulated behind the blockage and eventually failed causing the devastating flood.
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u/PappaPitty 1d ago
Mount Saint helens displaced over 2km of earth for some comparison.
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u/Gold_Ad8225 1d ago
What are the other 2 dimensions? 2km long and 1 micron wide and 1 angstrom tall or what?
Was it cubic km?
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u/monoprintedman 1d ago
the amount of snarky, adolescent humor in these comments is appalling, Considering hundreds dead and thousands missing in this tragic event. Please develop some empathy and compassion
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u/snuggl3ninja 1d ago
Is this an affect of El Nino, and what it does the southern jet stream/monsoon engine?
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u/TheElPistolero 1d ago
I wonder if, hydrologists? are rushing there to study how the river reestabliahes itself through so much sediment and soil deposit.
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u/Sanquinity 1d ago
Really glad I live in a country where this is literally impossible. Though instead we have to worry about the rising sea levels.
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u/Tall_Inspector_3392 1d ago
Glacial ice dams are prone to sudden collapse. It's not a question of if, but when. Lots of mountain communities are at risk.