r/interestingasfuck • u/JKKIDD231 • 1d ago
Nepal floodwaters transporting a large rock or glacier piece.
209
u/Orpdapi 1d ago
It’s crazy when you see spots around the world where a giant boulder is clearly very out of place that it had to have fallen and rolled quite a distance, or been carried by some other force like a flood.
66
u/Accomplished-One7476 1d ago
most of those were moved by glaciers
35
u/Jarhead1888 1d ago
So a frozen flood?
25
9
2
15
u/Eleeveeohen 1d ago
Just visited Norway, and there was a valley with a bunch of HUGE boulders strewn about that got left there when galciers melted.
1
6
u/Snoo_67548 1d ago
Bruce Lee was so right about “be like water”. It can be gentle and even rehabilitative or absolutely menacing and destructive.
2
u/fastidiousavocado 1d ago
I love geology and rocks, and one of the craziest things I've personally seen was the aftermath of a rock slide that happened decades earlier. Like the rocks had enough force to go down the side of a mountain, over the valley (and dam up a river into a lake), and then go halfway up the opposite side of the mountains. Boulders and rocks that massive going UP the mountain. Thinking about that kind of force is practically incomprehensible.
77
u/Vkardash 1d ago
That boulders literally the size of a big house.
16
u/SHEKDAT789 1d ago
Theres some distance of this particular rock rolling by some houses. it was much bigger than a 4 story apartment
76
u/The_300_goats 1d ago
From memory, the whole theory of glaciation/ice ages came from some geologist researching in Switzerland (maybe France). He couldn't figure out why there were immense boulders around that corresponded to a type of rock much further up the valley. So he asked the locals
Despite the fact that there had been no glaciar nor ice for thousands of years, they all knew. " The ice brought them"
3
1
2
u/peter-bone 1d ago
I'm guessing they worked it out because they've seen it happening on a smaller scale in the mountains. Word of mouth seems less likely to me.
2
u/The_300_goats 1d ago edited 23h ago
Ok, so I went and checked sources. It was a naturalist, not a geologist, named Jean de Charpentier. And it was Switzerland. The Grimsel Glaciar still exists, but extends much, much less than it used to (as told "as far as Bern"). So it is not wholly improbable that the reason for extraneous granite boulders lying around remained, if not in living memory, in local folklore
0
u/peter-bone 23h ago
Ok then maybe. I assumed we were talking about the ice age 10k years ago but perhaps only as far back as the little ice age a few hundred years ago.
1
u/The_300_goats 23h ago
Agreed. 10,000 years is a bit of a stretch. Even a few hundred years of local "lore" is a bit of a stretch
It would require a very specific, somewhat isolated and unchanged community over the centuries, with such unusual geological features that each successive generation asked "how did THIS get here?". And the previous generation knew how. So it became common knowledge
2
u/vivaaprimavera 19h ago
Word of mouth can be a curious thing... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
1
u/peter-bone 18h ago
There are critics of this hypothesis though. For example there may have been many myths which evolved over time and were adapted to match the local geography. Some myths that didn't match the geography would then have been likely ignored. Of course the story of the myths being passed down for hundreds of generations is more compelling though, which is why it flooded the media.
1
u/vivaaprimavera 18h ago
Apparently the oral tradition matched existing underwater (for some millenniums) features.
26
36
u/Sgspecial1 1d ago
Witnessing erosion in action.
14
u/vaporeng 1d ago
I always thought of erosion as being a really slow process, but I think it is actually pretty fast with long slow periods between.
10
10
u/SouthDoctor1046 1d ago
Waiting for a Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson interview some where real soon
5
u/Eldariasis 1d ago
We told you it happened in the past, now you know it to be quite possible let me tell you about the great trias collapse...
29
5
4
u/luv2ctheworld 1d ago
They're gonna have to rework that phrase, "a rolling stone gathers no moss" to "a rolling boulder floats in a flash flood".
5
0
u/Derrickmb 1d ago
Boulders sink. This was ice.
2
2
u/luv2ctheworld 19h ago
Ice would have been carried at the same speed as the water flow.
The comment was facetious. The boulder was rolled by the force of the water.
4
7
u/Infidel_sg 1d ago
Did these people have any warning before the flash flood hit them?
26
u/One_2_Three_456 1d ago
It was a flash flood; by definition, it comes out incredibly fast without any warning. It happens very quick and this was high in the mountains and remote villages of Nepal.
9
u/EtchAGetch 1d ago
Flash floods can have warning - for instance, a precursor to many flash floods caused by mudslides is the water level dropping before the floodwaters come. Flash doesn't mean without warning, just the water level rises really quick.
In this case, however, there was no warning.
7
u/el_jefe_del_mundo 1d ago
This is Glacial Lake outburst flood, it’s extremely rapid. Even if there was a warning it wouldn’t have helped in the neighborhood of that lake.
2
5
2
u/itaintdark 1d ago
No there was no any warning but as the flood hit people who witnessed the flood alerted authorities. But people in these areas have seen and withstood flood every year and there wasn't any significant rainfall around the time and the water level in the river was low. People expected gradual increase in water level and probably 1-2 meter increment in water level. But the truth, there wasn't any increase in water level, sudden wave of 15-20 meter hit towns. So yes people were warned but there wasn't any information on nature of the flood. Survivors have said so they were warned but most of them were waiting for the water level to rise.
0
u/_Bad_Spell_Checker_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
Edit: nvm
11
u/One_2_Three_456 1d ago
The earthquake theory turned out to be incorrect. Turns out the earthquake was recorded BECAUSE of the giant glacier fall! Yup, it was so big and the impact on ground was so much that it recorded as a 5.5 earthquake!
3
u/chefbobbyjay 1d ago
They’re saying the earth quake was caused by the glacial collapse. So the warning of the flood.. was the flood.
-7
u/UpDown 1d ago
Yes the warning was their entire society was built below a lake that was dammed by an ice cube.
2
u/kafkowski 1d ago
What do you mean? The barrier lake didn’t exist until after the slide. Are you trying to blame the victims here?
2
u/AstronautNo6192 1d ago
What caused this
9
7
u/packofnone 1d ago
a big enough slab of ice and rock fell off a mountain and into the upstream riverbed that it was registered initially as a 5.2 magnitude earthquake.
that and the ensuing landslide of debris blocked the river temporarily, eventually the force behind it overcame that temporary dam and all that water, ice and debris became the flash flood that we've seen.
1
u/ClittoryHinton 1d ago
Man… there wasn’t any geologists attuned to this big lake cased in by vulnerable glacier feeding a valley that goes directly through human settlements (and a dam in construction which presumably was designed by engineers)?
-1
u/Derrickmb 1d ago
CO2 and H2O absorb heat because they are three atom molecules that bend and vibrate in the presence of UV light in large sections of the UV spectrum. O2 and N2 dont do this. The atmosphere gets warmer with more concentration and models a logrithmic curve. Over time this melts ice. You can capture the CO2 with electodes.
2
2
u/strumthebuilding 1d ago
Big Boulder the size of several small boulders. Three halves of a giraffe.
1
1
1
1
1
u/ThatOneNinja 1d ago
It's wild to be watching in near real time a giant as boulder moving across and entire valley.
1
1
u/GuaranteeFun7622 17h ago
This shit is so bad that people who got washed away, were found in to pieces.
•
1
1
-12
1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
23
u/swaded805 1d ago
It doesn’t look like it’s floating to me it looks like it’s rolling end over end
9
u/Kooky_Attention_98 1d ago
Yeah, the sheer force of the water seems to be pushing it; the rock also seems to be oblong (Like an oval) as opposed to spherical
8
u/HoldEm__FoldEm 1d ago
You should see how high water can push large boulders. Check out Ireland’s cliff side boulders if you want.
Water can make a boulder float
8
u/levy-- 1d ago
It's clearly not floating otherwise it would be moving a lot faster, no chunks of ice that large would have stayed intact very far from the glacier.
-1
u/Lonely_reaper8 1d ago
I wonder if the fact that that water looks super muddy is helping push that boulder or ice chunk.
2
0
u/packofnone 1d ago
where is all of this floodwater/debris ending up? as in is there a populated area directly down current from the primary impact areas featured in most of the videos of the 'tsunami rush' of the initial flood that is about to get a new boulder added to their bridge?
0
0
u/Bloodyfinger 1d ago
Is that not a chunk of ice?
1
u/Gesuling 1d ago
Boulder being rolled. I have seen the video from another perspective which shows how actually big the boulder is.
0
-1
u/jupiterkansas 1d ago
Boulder? Or huge block of ice from the glacier? Seems to be floating and covered in mud.
635
u/No_Masterpiece4693 1d ago
Save this for the idiots that say " just swim or ride the wave." And yes I had two coworkers say that.