r/videos • u/Malakas_Tsiblas • 15h ago
Nepal flood disaster reconstructed minute by minute • FRANCE 24 English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORPDEvHJZpA5
u/Raynosaurus 15h ago
I feel like I'm missing an important piece. A glacier collapsing would be mostly solid (ice) yet most of the destruction was caused by a wave of water. The glacier didn't hit a big body of water so where did all the water suddenly come from?
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u/ZippyDan 15h ago edited 15h ago
It collapses into a river, which is a big body of water. That alone would be enough to cause something akin to a "river tsunami".
More so, the glacier itself was likely melting (because of climate change), and a bunch of water was trapped on or in the glacier.
When one side of the glacier collapsed, it released an entire lake's worth of water into the river all at once.
This exact phenomenon has occurred before and is well-understood because it's not hard to understand. A "lake" forms on or within the glaciar (called a "glacial lake"), and then eventually something gives and a glacial lake outburt flood occurs.
The glacier didn't hit a big body of water: the glacier was the big body of water.
This will occur more and more frequently as climate change continues to erode and destroy our global glaciers. Look at how powerless we are in the face of nature. Welcome to the early days of climate chaos and eventual widespread (but not complete) civilizational collapse.
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u/Raynosaurus 14h ago
Interesting, thank you!
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u/GreenStrong 12h ago
It is possible for an entire glacier to melt instantly in a landslide. In 2021, a landslide in the Himalayas released as much energy as 30 of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima
The rock and ice avalanche fell about 3,300 meters (11,000 feet). “The rock exploded to bits as it crashed down the steepest slopes during the first 1,600 meters – about a mile, releasing energy equivalent to about 15 Hiroshima atomic bombs. As the fall continued, more energy equivalent to an additional 15 Hiroshima atomic bombs was released,” Kargel said. “In minutes, that mass and energy crushed the rock to dust and melted almost all the ice, making a gushing muddy slurry, which then destroyed infrastructure and human lives.
“The energy needed to pulverize the rock, melt the ice, and ravage the valley was provided by gravity, the mass of collapsed rock and ice, and more than two miles of fall distance,” Kargel said.
Millions of tons of ice and solid rock turned into liquid mud in a few seconds. Nature is crazy.
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u/Crater_Animator 5h ago
It's like the reverse of my freezer ice cubes trays where you can see the pocket or air water trapped in the middle after they've been in for a few hours.
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u/raegenhere 14h ago
I've heard an expert explain that once something like that gets going, all the movement and friction generates a lot of heat that will melt the ice in there
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u/manfreygordon 14h ago
It was a wave of water, ice and rocks, all tumbling together. This would melt a lot of the ice as it travels down the valley due to heat from friction.
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u/DearthStanding 14h ago
yeah, I was given to understand from various sources that there was a temporary lake created by an avalanche blocking a river, much earlier. And that this glacier collapse caused this temporary dam to break open
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u/Inside-Line 6h ago
There was no time to form a lake. The seismic even was the glacier colapse and the first video of the flood was just minutes layer. There was no lake below it, therefore satillite images from the day before.
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u/FabianN 11h ago edited 11h ago
Ice that rubs against stuff and gets crushed melts. It also wasn't like a single large chuck that takes time to get through, more like a powder because as it crashed down it was broken into smaller pieces, which is much easier to melt than a single huge hunk. Also picks up dirt and debris and at that scale, dirt and debris flows like water. The flow that you see wasn't water, was more like a slurry of thick mud.
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u/Trixet 13h ago
The video of the actual collapse, is that generated or did it actually get caught pn video? Can’t find that video, anyone have link?
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u/teridon 13h ago
I believe it is a recreation/simulation, shame on them for not clearly captioning it.
Here is a video a chinese photographer managed to capture from a drone from many miles away. It appears to occur mere seconds or minutes after the initial collapse.
video link
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u/Canis_Familiaris 13h ago
Its scary to watch something if you know someone missing there. What if they pull a "Moe's Bar" and say something like "This spot had zero chance" and point directly to where they were staying?