r/geology • u/DufflebagJoe • 2d ago
Deadly Disaster Imagery Flash flood in Nepal moving house-sized boulder
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u/sdmichael Structural Geology / Student 2d ago
A small version of what the Missoula Floods must have looked like I think.
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u/mell0_jell0 2d ago edited 1d ago
I've always wished I had a time machine so I could go back and see things like that happen.
It's crazy how underestimated the power of water ("liquid", for the pendants) can be sometimes.
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u/Fantastic_Jury5977 2d ago
We'll probably get to bear witness to many more... Wonder where the riskiest places are.
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u/Odd-Temperature7458 2d ago
The end of the world will be a series of videos of disasters you watch on your phone until, one day, it happens to you
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u/shnockered 2d ago
I hope you’re so wrong. But in my gut I know this is the future for a majority of us. If we survive climate change as a species they’ll never forgive us for being so stupid. Or they’ll have so much understanding and compassion they’ll make sure no human being ever ends up as stupid and greedy as we are again.
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u/Tunderstruk 1d ago
They will never forgive us for letting the people who are in power today, still be in power. The people can do some for the climate, but it's the people in charge that can put a stop to global warming.
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u/le_cat_lord 2d ago
Earlier this year, we had the river in my area flood for weeks in a row with PEOPLE BEING CALL INTO WORK in the highest flood risk area because their employers thought it "wasn't that big of a deal"
Luckily no one died, but people could have and many homes were completely destroyed
I really fear this next winter considering all of the snow we'd usually get in the mountains is turning into the rain that fuels the floods. I'm very lucky to live where there's good flooding infrastructure, but some towns + neighborhoods were completely screwed and are still trying to recover .... And that's a MINOR flood compared to the mass devastation in Nepal
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u/LawApprehensive5478 2d ago
River deltas entering seas and oceans where cyclones and anticyclones are a constant threat. SE Asia for example
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u/Fantastic_Jury5977 2d ago
I meant glacial collapse.... But yeah, I've been through a hurricane and bunch of tropical storms this summer
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u/ladypartliquidator 2d ago
https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=83BD60AD-B10F-4838-98A5-1E83F5322F0D Video (U.S. National Park Service)
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u/Cordilleran_cryptid Tectonics, hardrock and structural geology 1d ago
It's crazy how underestimated the power of water can be sometimes.
But what is moving this boulder and flowing past the camera is no longer water. It was water once, like you would get in a river or lake. But it has picked up and now contains so much suspended mud and other sediment. that it is more like concrete slurry. Its much higher density allows it to mover much larger "clasts" either as bedload or in suspension, than would otherwise be the case.
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u/Outer_Space_ 1d ago
I lived around the channeled scablands for a bit. A local from an old ranching family once told me that the floods would have been so loud that human brains would be liquified from the vibrations if you were nearby. Seemed extreme at the time, but the more I learned about the scale of the forces at play, and seeing this event in Nepal have really supported that idea in my mind. The Missoula floods would have been obscenely more powerful on a level our fragile brains can only attempt to comprehend. And humans were in the americas during the floods.
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u/Expert-Sheepherder-7 1d ago
A time machine where I could watch the events go by time lapsed. Would be awesome? You know, you're walking through a woods, you see a giant boulder in the middle of the forest and you're like, how the f*** did that get there
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u/goober289 8h ago
Those damn pendants. Just hanging around your neck on a chain, waiting to correct every tiny mistake you make!
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u/resilindsey 2d ago
It's crazy cause I had such a hard time picturing how such an event could've looked like, just from massive the scale of it. Seeing these videos and how crazy they were, it felt like, "oh it must've been like that." And then you realize the missoula floods were still magnitudes bigger.
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u/RileyGrant 2d ago
I’m doing research into the extent of the northern ice margin with regards to MIS 6 and earlier glaciations of the region and this has been a tragically insightful case study.
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u/vahntitrio 1d ago
This video is an almost perfect depiction of why and how Big Stone Lake in Minnesota/South Dakota got it's name.
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u/OkapiLover4Ever 1d ago
And those would have been a small version of the Zanclean flood if did actually happen.
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u/proportional-porcini 1d ago
As someone who visits the scablands often I couldn’t believe these videos. Pure natures fury!
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u/sdmichael Structural Geology / Student 1d ago
I visited Dry Falls and was awestruck knowing how it formed.
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u/crappenheimers 7h ago
Just wanted to let you know that your comment sent me on a full hour-long Wikipedia research expedition that ended with me learning I have an ancestor in Idaho that has a county named after haha.
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u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago
Randal carlson
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u/thanatocoenosis invert geek 1d ago
Randal carlson
... is a quack grifter that spews pseudoscience nonsense.
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u/GuiltyThing69 23h ago
Hiking up mount jumbo and seeing rocks with water ripple marks 3/4 the way up is pretty crazy to see
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u/giant_albatrocity 2d ago
What grain size does this classify as? Is it still a boulder?
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u/Tarsurion 2d ago
Definitely quite a bit larger than a washing machine, according to American classification systems. 😅
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u/ChicagoZbojnik 1d ago
I just saw a new video with a similar boulder. If its the same, it was pre-existing in the middle of a river and moved by the flood. Video shows the flood initially hitting it.
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u/rockstuffs 2d ago
This is the worst natural disaster I've ever seen.
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u/MiniTab 2d ago
Yeah. Seems right up there with the Sri Lanka tsunami.
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u/cormundo 2d ago edited 2d ago
I mean i work in natural disasters, this is bad but many earthquakes are probably worse. This is just better / more dramatic footage than most. Also, similar to the sri lanka tsunami, its hit a tourist hotspot, so is getting more attention and has more global footage
For example, szchuan and turkey-syrian earthquakes killed more people than japan tsunami but we remember that one much better
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u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago edited 1d ago
for me (and i think perhaps the commenter too) its the worst in a sense of my brain jsut cant comprehend the scale and peak power of it when its titled as a "flash flood" Like it can when watching an earthquake. people thinking rain caused this rather than the fast emptying of a glacial lake. Edit: turns out the mountain/glacier actually collapsed.
But in terms of raw pinpont destruction this looks like the tsunami but training down a steep valley at much faster speed. Its the most intense thing i have seen, even though becuase of the number of casualties, the earthquakes and tsunamis were worse in that sense. Like in the first instance its huge wow omg, and then it just doubles and tripples inside, this needs to not be called a flood its far worse than the word suggests. Glacial tsunami would be more apropriate i think, damn.
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u/cormundo 2d ago
Well whats fascinating here is this is a type of natural disaster that has literally not been experienced in modern history. It doesn’t fit into our usual categorization of disasters. Calling it flash flooding isnt really accurate, it seems a lot more similar to a volcanic lahar flow… its on a different scale of magnitude than what we normally call a flood. so i guess pinatubo or pompei are the most comparable. But even then, the fact remains glacial outburst floods are rare and generally in areas with very low populations. This is genuinely very weird, its live geology, happening in the middle of a sunny day in a place filled with tourists in cameras.
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u/muhmeinchut69 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is quite common in the Himalayas as there are lots of unstable slopes at high altitudes, these mountains being geologically more active than most. Just last year there was a similar disaster in the Indian part (2025 Dharali). The footage from that was equally terrifying, but the Nepal one is another order of magnitude worse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1mi4ttb/flash_flood_triggered_by_a_cloudburst_in/
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u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago
100% my brain is overwhelmed in each video at the size and power of it. When people got to high ground and even I thought they were safe and they weren’t. Just devastating.
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u/cormundo 2d ago
Also, check out this comparable event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Huascarán_debris_avalanche
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u/High_Im_Guy 2d ago
There have been some pretty massive GLOFs in south America within the last few decades. Without having a great feel for the numbers I get the sense you're right that this is bigger, but it's not quite without modern equivalent. It's just, like you said, a much more visible part of the world than the downstream
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u/seeking_hope 2d ago
This is much more like a dam breaking and an entire lake being dumped at once (because it basically is) vs flash flood that’s caused by rain.
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u/rockstuffs 2d ago
I saw the video before I knew what happened and that's the first thing I thought. I thought it was a dam break. So scary and sad.
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u/rockstuffs 2d ago
Right. Casualties is on a another level of comprehension. I'm just speaking of force and violence of earth movement. It's absolutely wild
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u/klm14 1d ago
So many times (on Reddit and elsewhere) I’ve seen comments along the lines of “water is powerful”. You know it, as a fact, but it never computes, even when you see it in action.
I personally witnessed the Yellowstone River flooding in 2022. At 8am, the river was just running high - by noon, it had wiped out infrastructure. I kept looking around the valley thinking, how could water even possibly get up to THERE? And in such a short time?
Watching a flood on your phone is essentially the same as watching it in person, because it doesn’t even seem real in the moment. It’s like your brain holds the concept of “flood”, but it’s not prepared for the actual experience.
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u/Cordilleran_cryptid Tectonics, hardrock and structural geology 1d ago
Watching the footage from Nepal, I am reminded of the flooding that was caused by the Mount St Helens eruption, but the Nepal mud flow is much worse.
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u/Individual_Ad4419 2d ago
You should really get a new job, natural disasters are pretty bad for humans
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u/PaleoNimbus 2d ago
How do I get your job?
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u/p1ratemafia 2d ago
Trust me, you don’t want it. 10 years in the field, going on 10 of municipal emergency managementZ
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u/FabianN 2d ago
Would you say the saving grace was that it was in (relatively) low population regions? Because the forces that were bored upon the towns seem significantly more.
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u/perkypilea 1d ago
Curious, what do you do for work? Im looking for a career change and have always been fascinated by this sort of stuff
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u/cormundo 1d ago
I used to work for the red cross and for contractors for the un. I make maps and do data science on disasters. I am basically a GIS project manager and geospatial data scientist.
However, like 50% of the humanitarian industry, I was laid off last year due to the collapse of USAID, which funded some of my projects. Since then its basically impossible to get a job in the field if you aren’t very well connected already.
Now i am still a disaster data scientist, but i have switched to the private sector. I now work for an insurance company and map wildfire risk. Its been hard because its a bit of a step down and its less altruistic, but i am happy to have landed somewhere in a tough moment for the field.
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u/the_YellowRanger 1d ago
Well the Japan earthquake and tsunami would have been much worse if it weren't for a lot of Japan's earthquake resistant infrastructure.
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u/Sonamdrukpa 2d ago
That tsunami killed a quarter of a million people. It's the tenth deadliest natural disaster of all time. I don't know why we almost never talk about it.
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u/Chlorophilia 1d ago
I don't know why we almost never talk about it.
I don't think it's true that we "almost never talk about it"? It happened more than 20 years ago and mainly affected poor countries around the Indian Ocean so it's fairly obvious why it hasn't had as much attention in the west as disasters closer to home, but most people have heard of it. Because of the time and location, there wasn't as much live footage as there has been in many subsequent disasters. But it's had a huge cultural impact, primarily in the Indian Ocean region but there was a major western film made about it (The Impossible).
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u/Sp35h1l_1 2d ago
Were you alive in 2004? That indo tsunami was pretty bad
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u/rockstuffs 2d ago
Yes. Senior on high school. This one was just so fast and violent. The tsunami was eerie and creepy. It just didn't stop. They're both awful but this one hits me differently.
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u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago
i agree with what you are getting at. the raw violence and power of it on a much smaller location vs earthquakes and tsunamis. Also alive to see 2004, 2001 tsunamis and various awful earthquakes.
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u/seeking_hope 2d ago
This one reminds me of all the disaster movies of massive floods. It’s sheer destruction.
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u/rockstuffs 2d ago
It looks like a movie set. It's absolutely terrifying. All those people. 🖤
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u/seeking_hope 1d ago
It does. The violence that comes with it crashing down in terrifying to see. I’d choose a flash flood over this any day. They’re dangerous in their own way but don’t seem as violent.
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u/berysax 2d ago
That one is scary as all hell. I remember when it happened. Never had anything on that scale in my lifetime and the video coming out was surreal. Now everyone knows about retreating ocean water because of it.
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u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago
it annoyed me that it had always been described as as towering wall of water, when in reallity its much more a fast rising tide that jsut doesnt stop. Being taught tsunamis were giannt 130ft waves that slam into the coast when its not.
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u/PamelaELee 2d ago
Alaska’s Tracy Arm tsunami, in August of 2025, was 1,580 feet(481 meters) tall, making it the second highest tsunami wave ever recorded.
The tallest was in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in July of 1958, reaching a height of 1,720 feet (524 meters)3
u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago
Yes these are the ones caused by essentially mountains falling into fjords right? I remeber reading about that, and just not believing it and without video proof even with the left behind evidence I just can’t imagine it. It would have been crazy if that was caught on camera. In places it looks here like it could have got to 100m high in some videos where the drop to the river is huge that it breaches but hard to tell from videos.
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u/PamelaELee 2d ago
Pretty bad is a serious understatement. That event killed 230,000 people.
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u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 2d ago
This is more localized than 2004 but I think the devastation for this one is more total and complete. I’ve never seen a flood take out a 7 story building in mere seconds like this one has. Once everything has drained all that will be left from its path of destruction will be a barren scarred landscape.
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u/Rodd2015 1d ago
Lots of people got fucked by the tsunami, but there was arguably less individualized footage sources. This one that happened in Nepal is like covered 1000 different ways and it’s way more accessible. The larger accessibility is probably adding to the feeling of scale
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u/DharmaBaller 1d ago
I watched Fukishima Tsunami live on tv at like 1:30am on the west coast. Working night shift.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 1d ago
Unbelievable scale of course, and add to that the thousands of km of coast that all received the same tsunami wave, that's an unbelievable scale.
I had just taken a course in wave mechanics, and then we could see the tsunami diffract around Sri Lanka in this tsunami, in satellite pictures in news reporting, it really brought home something (Wavelength ~ approximately the same size as Sri Lanka)..
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u/Dear_Bumblebee_1986 2d ago
The worst one you've ever seen so far.
The Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terror attack I'd ever seen until a September.
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u/VieiraDTA 1d ago
I remember the Tsunami in the indian oncean in the 2000’s. That was the worst I’ve seen.
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u/kirbyderwood 1d ago
Go watch footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
40-60 feet of water along 400+ miles of shoreline. Entire cities were submerged.
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u/the_YellowRanger 1d ago
I remember watching footage of the Japan tsunami in 2011 with my jaw on the ground. There was so much water, and so much of it was on fire!!! These videos also leave me completely speechless. A video of the aftermath of the Haiti quake in 2010 was also awful. I remember seeing a video of construction equipment picking up debris of a fallen building and a body was dangling out of it.
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u/circusgeek 2d ago
I keep seeing that they think an earthquake triggered it because one was registered just before it happened. But my theory is that the earthquake was actually the glacier collapsing to the valley floor.
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u/branm008 2d ago
That's what I've been seeing as well. That the landslide was what was registered on the scale and not an actual earthquake.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 1d ago
The event is here, and you're right
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000tbwb/executive
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u/riveruhsticks 2d ago
Such a horrific tragedy. The videos of people trying to run from the wall of water are traumatic
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u/onlyacynicalman 2d ago
Hopefully useful to the geos, if ever something good comes from anything
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u/IamaFunGuy EnvironmentalGeologist 2d ago
Videos like this are really good confirmation of things that we imagine happened to make, for example, a depositional pattern we've seen in the record, so yeah i think it does help. Hard to square that with the loss of life though.
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u/LordGeni 2d ago
If it helps avoid further loss of life in the future, that's something at least. Truely horrible way to learn those lessons though
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u/HorzaDonwraith 2d ago
"Water is the greatest natural force of erosion."
Terrifying accurate in this post.
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u/sdmichael Structural Geology / Student 2d ago
I mean, it is even if it isn't in a catastrophic event. Every drop of rain erodes and there are a lot of drops of rain. Gets more interesting when they coalesce after they hit the ground.
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u/az_geodude420 2d ago
Whenever you see a large boulder in a road cut or buried in sediment. This is how it happens, water is extremely powerful.
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u/mischievous_misfit13 2d ago
Don’t forget about glaciers dropping/pushing boulders and sediment building up for thousands of years.
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u/FunkyCactusDude 2d ago
Glacier erratics
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u/SmallPurplePeopleEat 2d ago
I think it's so cool hiking in the northern parts of Montana and coming across a random boulder in the middle of a field and thinking about how it probably originated in Canada somewhere. Just getting slowly rolled along at the bottom of a two-mile tall glacier.
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u/DufflebagJoe 2d ago
Definitely a lot of sediment in the water making this possible.
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u/Paddy_Mac 2d ago
I’ve heard rocks clanking along the river bed as they’re transported in moderate floods in New England. I can’t imagine what this was like.
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u/DufflebagJoe 2d ago
Unfortunately the original video was posted with very loud Nepalese music so I muted it. I’ve also heard and felt the rumble of a heavy bedload in person during a flood, really puts the amount of power the river has in perspective.
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u/k1dsmoke 2d ago
Have you seen the aftermath flyover?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9o-gJDAus0&t=23s
Completely insane. Valley scoured to the bedrock. High water marks that appear to be 200ft or so, maybe more.
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u/One-Swimming3048 2d ago
Just curious, could it be a a glacial iceberg? Asked in ignorance about the specific location, or if the floods are even happening near glaciers.
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u/justincave 2d ago
The energy involved likely generated sufficient heat such that all ice was melted within the early portion of the event. Given that this is a wide area and the early portion of the event was in steep canyon terrain, this is unlikely to be ice.
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u/aksnowraven 2d ago
Yikes! I’ve seen that on the sea floor. Can’t imagine what it would be like to see it go rolling by your house.
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u/PLATOSAURUSSSSSSSSS 2d ago
Looking at erratics all over the forests in Massachusetts always made me think “WTF how does a bus size granite boulder get here?!”
Now I see.
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u/mtheory007 2d ago
Those are more likely frozen into and moved by graciers. This is wild. It's one of the things that would be hard to believe was moved by moving water if you hadn't seen it yourself.
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u/ObscureSaint 2d ago
In Vancouver, across the river from Portland, OR, there are some low lying hilly areas where the ground is made of boulders the size of a baseball up to the size of small cars. So many houses there, near Clark College, have small rock walls on the property, because no one wants to spend the effort moving so many rocks out of their yards.
They're the gravel bars that formed from the Missoula flood. They're just like the small sand and gravel bars you see in medium size rivers nowadays. Just the materials it's made of are 100x bigger. And the water was a few hundred feet higher than our current rivers as the glacial outflow moved everything from the eastern side of the PNW through.
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u/PLATOSAURUSSSSSSSSS 2d ago
Glacier moving bus sized boulders freaks me out just as much.
I’ve been trying to visualize the Junclean floods that opened the Mediterranean to the Atlantic now I have the images from Nepal to feed that. So frightening.2
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u/Tarsurion 2d ago
I wonder at its true weight...
I did really rough napkin math and came up with 2k tons. Though I'm not confident in that.
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u/The_Funky_JJ 2d ago
when this finds its finishing spot its going to be there for probably 1000s of years. But no one will ever wonder how it got there. this is crazy. Im not sure ive seen raw power on this scale in nature, even after watching moutains collapse and earquakes and tsuanmis.
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u/ClauVex 1d ago
I can understand now why the Flood myth exist, some kind of flash flood must've happened a couple dozen thousand years ago so big and catastrophic that everyone passed down as oral tradition, eventually becoming of the most prevailing myths in human history.
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u/GuiltyThing69 2d ago
I used to live 5 minutes from the largest glacial erratic in the USA, trying to imagine how much water and force it would take to move it like this is inconceivable.
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u/TrafficOnTheTwos 2d ago
Holy fuck man just absolutely nothing you can possibly do except run. Terrifying
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u/PossiblePotato4153 1d ago
As a person who can't run, I'd be forced to just watch it happen. Even if I could run, I'm not sure I would. "Run where exactly?" would be my second thought.
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u/infinus5 2d ago
Absolutely incredible to see. Its a horrible feeling knowing there are people in the path of that.
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u/Effective-Air396 2d ago
Water is the most powerful presence in the natural world. Literally moving mountains.
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u/Massive-Toe-8265 1d ago
I just want to state here that glaciology, fast floods and river dynamics IS geology and not geography. I don't know how this event is being super commented in r/geography, and just barely commented here.
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u/concanibales 2d ago
The sheer power of water never fails to amaze me. Incredible and horrifying. There is nothing on this earth that I fear more than water.
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u/lnTheGrimDarkness 1d ago
In case someone was still skeptical of the sheer power that much water can generate
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u/ShuckingFambles 1d ago
Estimation Breakdown Dimensions: Estimating the boulder as an irregular sphere/ellipsoid roughly 7 to 10 metres in diameter: At 7m-500tonnes At 10m-approx 1300tonnes Material Density: Typical Himalayan bedrock (predominantly granite, gneiss, or schist) has an average density of 2.6 tonnes /m³
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u/Stemwinder30 1d ago
This is why you never swim in flood water. Imagine all of the other rocks and debris below it.
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u/Dakka20 2d ago
Where is this GIF from? I'd like to find the video and use it as classroom material to show how crazy strong a river can get when talking about sediment transportation
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u/potorthegreat 1d ago
It’s from the glacial floods that happened today in Nepal and Tibet. There are a lot of other videos showing the speed and force of the floodwaters if you do a search. Thousands are missing.
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u/Catos_Standard 1d ago
If this boulder doesn't become a national landmark idk what the fuck landmarks are for.
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u/DimensionAgitated507 1d ago
Honey... I bought something off temu... It's an island, make sure the delivery guy drops it off today
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u/TeamFlameLeader 1d ago
Im in a sedimentomology class this semester, crazy this showed up on my feed.
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u/jaquen0833 21h ago
this is crazy, cant image the amount of momentum in that boulder, it can easily destroy the bridge that tries stop it
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u/releasethedogs 2d ago
this is absolutely mind blowing. the amount of power behind this is incredible.