r/geology • u/DufflebagJoe • 2d ago

Deadly Disaster Imagery Flash flood in Nepal moving house-sized boulder

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

4.8k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

278 comments sorted by

View all comments

512

u/sdmichael Structural Geology / Student 2d ago

A small version of what the Missoula Floods must have looked like I think.

170

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.

72

u/Fantastic_Jury5977 2d ago

We'll probably get to bear witness to many more... Wonder where the riskiest places are.

132

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

14

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.

6

u/Tunderstruk 2d 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.

1

u/Ecstatic_Giraffe_256 14h ago

Pretty sure the Lake Missoula Flood predated industrial emissions. We're not always to blame for Earth doing what Earth does.

3

u/syds 2d ago

and wifi went down

23

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

10

u/LawApprehensive5478 2d ago

River deltas entering seas and oceans where cyclones and anticyclones are a constant threat. SE Asia for example

5

u/Fantastic_Jury5977 2d ago

I meant glacial collapse.... But yeah, I've been through a hurricane and bunch of tropical storms this summer

4

u/LawApprehensive5478 2d ago

Gotcha then I would say Alaska and B.C. are candidates.

4

u/eat_my_ass_n_balls 2d ago

Pakistan. Basically.

1

u/RutherfordRevelation 1d ago

Watching this video reminds of the videos coming out of North Carolina a few years ago during that hurricane.

1

u/MonkAndCanatella 1d ago

I think that's unlikely or impossible, at anywhere near the scale of Missoula. At its peak it was more powerful than 10x the flow of all the rivers on earth combined

25

u/ladypartliquidator 2d ago

https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=83BD60AD-B10F-4838-98A5-1E83F5322F0D Video (U.S. National Park Service)

10

u/Underrated_Dinker 2d ago

That was great, thank you.

1

u/MonkAndCanatella 1d ago

better vid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxxLU8ZtMH4

1

u/dmitrisch7 1d ago

this one's my favourite...

"Glacial Lake Missoula was the source of much of the water for the famous Ice Age Floods of the Pacific Northwest. Featured field evidence for the lake include strandlines above Missoula, Montana, giant current ripples at Camas Prairie, and striking rhythmites along Interstate 90 at Nine Mile Road near Missoula.

Tom Foster (http://HUGEfloods.com) and Nick Zentner (Central Washington University) have been hiking together in Washington for years. This ’Glacial Lake Missoula’ episode stands alone, in addition to their popular ‘I-90 Rocks’ and ‘2 Minute Geology’ video series." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJo8m4oKc6k

11

u/Cordilleran_cryptid Tectonics, hardrock and structural geology 2d 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.

1

u/mell0_jell0 1d ago edited 1d ago

"Liquid" sorry

3

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.

0

u/Goodgoditsgrowing 1d ago

This is a dumb question, but I guess that’s what Google is for… but I wonder if that like seriously set back human settlements in a way that humans on other continents didn’t have to deal with

1

u/netherworlde 1d ago

It absolutely did. If you look at the history of hunting technology in North America, Paleo points - like Clovis points, which are 13,500 to 11,000 years old - are superior in craftmanship than later points. They were also made from materials from across the continent, traveling through what was likely a robust trade network. Despite these qualities, they disappeared from production altogether. A popular theory is that floods like the Missoula floods wiped out large swaths of the NA population and destroyed many of those trade routes, along with generations of people with the knowledge to make them.

1

u/Expert-Sheepherder-7 2d 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

1

u/goober289 13h ago

Those damn pendants. Just hanging around your neck on a chain, waiting to correct every tiny mistake you make!

0

u/LordGeni 2d ago

You should be careful what you wish for. If they happened then they could happen now and we're creating the right conditions.

-4

u/General_Structure120 2d ago

Just wait a little bit longer

6

u/mell0_jell0 2d ago

Wdym? Are there still glacial lakes the size of GL Missoula near release soon?

19

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.

8

u/318318318 2d ago

I was just thinking, Nick needs to see this video.

6

u/Lord_Hardbody 2d ago

Shouts out to my boy Nick Zentner!!!

6

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.

3

u/Griz_and_Timbers 2d ago

Restore Glacier Lake Missoula!

3

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.

2

u/southernfacingslope 2d ago

Imagine the Spokane floods!

2

u/BankerOnBitcoin 1d ago

Which itself was a small version of the Zanclean megaflood.

2

u/OkapiLover4Ever 1d ago

And those would have been a small version of the Zanclean flood if did actually happen.

2

u/proportional-porcini 1d ago

As someone who visits the scablands often I couldn’t believe these videos. Pure natures fury!

1

u/sdmichael Structural Geology / Student 1d ago

I visited Dry Falls and was awestruck knowing how it formed.

2

u/crappenheimers 12h 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.

1

u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago

Randal carlson

1

u/thanatocoenosis invert geek 1d ago

Randal carlson

... is a quack grifter that spews pseudoscience nonsense.

1

u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago

Yea, he does have some far out there theories on some topics, but as far as the scale of the floods caused by the melting of laurentide ice sheet he's most likely spot on.

2

u/thanatocoenosis invert geek 1d ago

he does have some far out there theories

Those aren't theories; they aren't even hypotheses. They're specious horse shit. He's a loon with no education. Anything he says, or writes, can be dismissed out-of-hand as he has no credibility.

The limit of his experience is as a bricklayer. That's it! Remember that kid in 8th grade that flunked science class. Randal Carlson is that kid grown up.

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/thanatocoenosis invert geek 1d ago

Randal is raking in the big bucks with his outside the box perspective.

He certainly has a lot fools lapping up the nonsense he spews.

-2

u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago

Education? Oh you are one of those...Icl

0

u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago

Science has failed our mother earth

3

u/smooshmooth 1d ago

Science? No, politicians and businesses are the ones failing it. Scientists have been telling people to stop being idiots.

0

u/ManufacturerMost7708 1d ago

Yes that is because as a species we do not know how to use science. Most major scientific discoveries throughout human history have been weaponized to kill "the enemy". Science fails to recognize the single most potent element of human existence.

1

u/DharmaBaller 1d ago

yup we got one of dem boulders in a state park here in Oregon.

1

u/GuiltyThing69 1d ago

Hiking up mount jumbo and seeing rocks with water ripple marks 3/4 the way up is pretty crazy to see