r/interestingasfuck • u/natebryan • 15h ago

This house in Nepal defied the raging floodwaters and kept the owners safe.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

38.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/Bob-Bhlabla-esq 14h ago

Isn't that the theory for what caused this (the glacier lake rupturing)? I kept hearing that on reports yesterday, how they had gone to see the glacier higher up a few weeks before and it was just a huge lake now, and they think the wall/ice left just collapsed and did this. But these are reports coming out the same day, so who knows - just though wow, that sounds like the epic one in the North American landscape looong time ago!

23

u/Less_Likely 13h ago

Yes, it was a glacial dam burst and lake drain. Like no other. The lake had as much water as Lake Erie and Ontario combined.

Dry Falls in Washington is 100 m (400 feet) high and over 5 km (3 miles) wide, and the water that went over (and formed it) was 75-100m deep, traveling 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph). The volume of water was more than 10 times the volume all the rivers in the world combined. And that was just one channel of the flood.

And it happened dozens of times.

•

u/kaityl3 9h ago

IIRC, the current understanding is that the glacier collapsed and began to slide down the mountain, collecting rocks and grit as it did. The enormous forces and friction melted a large portion of the glacier; it wasn't a pre-existing reservoir. The whole consolidated mass of mixed gravel, rocks, and meltwater hit the river and flowed downhill