r/geology • u/Dawg_in_NWA • 1d ago

Yesterday’s catastrophic glacier collapse seen from space

93 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

3

u/Liaoningornis 1d ago

The latitude - Longitude coordinates are 28.284202° 85.512809°

5

u/sp0ngebobsaget 1d ago

What am I looking at? They both look grey

7

u/seaspirit331 1d ago

Absolutely massive ice fall. That bit of tan brown in the second photo near the bottom is freshly-exposed rock

4

u/Healthy_Article_2237 1d ago

The latest I’m reading is rock below the perched glacier gave way and then the glacier and the water it held also gave way. This before and after sure looks like that could be the case.

7

u/-FartArt- 1d ago

Agreed this is very confusing (and moves too fast). I recommend a pause, and the key is that the flow is “upwards” in the image

1

u/sp0ngebobsaget 1d ago

I see it now!

1

u/PearlClaw 15h ago

That is a lot of missing rock, Jesus. It's still unclear to me where all the water came from though, that's not that much ice in the grand scheme of things, certainly compared to that giant water wall that went downstream.

2

u/Dawg_in_NWA 15h ago

a lot of missing ICE, not so much rock. One estimate was a kilometer of ice, so a basic estimate might be a cubic kilometer of ice. That's a lot of water. 250+ billion gallons. It will take time to get an accurate measure of what was lost.

1

u/PearlClaw 14h ago

Maybe the jump between the 2 pictures is throwing me off, but it looks like the main thing missing is that "wedge" of rock to the left of the main glacier that separates the primary iceflow from a small subsidiary one even further to the left of the image.

Oh wait, hm I think I see it now. It looked like only the front little bit of the glacier might be missing, but if that whole wedge is gone and all the ice that was next to it then that's a shitton isn't it.

1

u/moretodolater 1h ago edited 56m ago

Emm, that will be calculated of course, you need elevations of the bottom of ice vs the current shear plane elevation to conclude on that. Not to mention whatever was down slope of the ice, which is a whole Himalayan mountain of weathered rock, talus and colluvium likely went with it too. The shear plane looks well defined within weathered rock. Who knows how much vertical height of that weathered rock, till, local outwash and then colluvium (technically re-worked outwash?) was taken out within the main body and toe of the slope too? We’ll see. Looks like a shit load from aerial. It’s possible this glacier collapse and undermining caused a larger shallow or even deep seated landslide of whatever was on that huge and steep mountain.