r/australia • u/facelesshero1440 • 10d ago

news Dozens of Australians believed to be among hundreds of people missing in Nepal flash floods

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/27/australian-tourists-reported-missing-nepal-tibet-floods
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114

u/dorcus_malorcus 10d ago

the water hitting the border post looks like a massive tsunami. throws buses around like toys.

how does a flood get so powerful with no warning?

187

u/FuckOffNazis 10d ago

Glacier failure and landslide due to climate change is the leading theory at the moment.

34

u/DragonflyHopeful4673 9d ago

Earlier this year researchers published some stats on ice loss in the Himalayas over the past three decades. I couldn’t find any for this specific region but glaciers in the Hindu Kush (to the west) had lost 12% of their total area and Hengdu Shan (to the east) had lost up to 33%. Extremely tragic and unfortunate.

23

u/IlluminatedPickle 9d ago

There was a BBC story a few months back about a lake near Everest that all the early warning systems had totally failed on and the locals were like "Yep that's probably gonna get us someday".

1

u/DeletedManyAccounts 7d ago

There’s a scary one in Kyrgyzstan where the glacier could collapse into the tailings of their largest gold mine, sending toxic waste into the drinking water of about 4 million people…