Why living downstream from a glacier has become a deadly liability

 

A mud-covered street in Nepal's Nuwakot district on August 26, 2026. A massive flood and landslide disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border has killed hundreds of people. Prakash Methema/AFP/Getty Images

by  By Laura Paddison

 

Living in the shadow of the world’s spectacular, ice-capped mountains has always carried dangers, but the devastating flood wave that carved a path of destruction on the Nepal-China border this week shows how life for the millions worldwide who live downstream of these peaks is becoming more unpredictable and more deadly.

It’s too soon to know what role climate change may have played in the catastrophic flooding, but what is clear is that mountains are changing fast as temperatures rise, melting glaciers and destabilizing slopes leading to complex, cascading disasters.

Nepal is a country of jagged, towering peaks with sheer slopes sweeping down to narrow valleys, cut through by powerful rivers. Its stunning landscape attracts hordes of tourists; it’s also treacherous.

Nestled in the rapidly warming Himalayas, the country has long been a hotspot for flooding and landslides. But what happened on Wednesday “was of significantly larger scale than what we have seen in the recent past,” said Prashant Baral, a cryosphere analyst at ICIMOD, a Nepali climate organization.

An enormous chunk of glacier around 2,000 feet wide sheared off Langtang Lirung mountain in northern Nepal, accompanied by landslide, according to satellite analysis. It sent a deadly mix of ice, water, rock, sediment and boulders the size of cars crashing 7,000 feet downward, causing such a powerful tremor, it was initially mistaken for an earthquake. 

 This torrent — described by some as “liquid concrete” — surged through narrow gorges, wiping out homes, buildings, power plants, bridges and roads. Hundreds have died; many hundreds more are missing. 

 

This event was remarkable in its ferocity, and it will take time to unravel the exact causes, but this kind of deadly flooding is precisely what scientists have warned would happen more frequently as humans heat the planet by burning fossil fuels.

“Whether this particular event can be tied to climate change or not, this is what we expect,” said Dan Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. “This is what climate change looks like.”

The impacts will be felt well beyond Nepal.

High in the mountains, ice is king, but it’s disappearing fast. Up to half of the more than 200,000 mountain glaciers — vast, slow-moving rivers of ice that creep across the world’s peaks — are expected to disappear by the end of this century, even if ambitious climate goals are met. 

 

The rate of ice loss from glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, which includes Nepal, have doubled since 2000, according to recent ICIMOD research.

As glaciers shrink, they can become more unstable and “sudden failures can occur,” said Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. 

Water forms under Nepal's Khumbu glacier as the ice melts. Glaciers in Hindu Kush Himalaya rare melting at increasingly rapid rates as the world warms. Alex Treadway/ICIMOD/Reuters

 

Ice also holds mountains together, in the form of permafrost, a mix of soil, rock, sediment and ice. “Think of the high mountains like this as shattered bedrock glued together by ice-filled joints,” said Richard Waller, a physical geographer at Keele University in England.

As temperatures rise, ice melts, permafrost thaws and the landscape shifts. Vast chunks of mountainside can destabilize and give way.

Glacial lakes, which form as glaciers melt, pose another hazard. They can become so full, they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down steep mountainsides. A glacial lake outburst was responsible for flooding in a similar area of Nepal in July last year, killing at least 11 people. 

 Then there’s rain, which is becoming more intense as the planet warms. Extreme precipitation is increasingly falling on mountains as rain not snow, increasing the risks of landslides and soil erosion. 

People walk on a suspension bridge to cross the flooded Trishuli River in Bhaise, Nuwakot, Nepal, on July 08, 2025. Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto/Getty Images

 

There are many glaciers “hanging above our heads, and anytime they can burst,” said Bishal Upreti, a geologist and president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management. When they do, it’s like a “tsunami from the sky,” he said.

Nepal may be particularly at risk, but this is a global problem. Any high mountain areas with glaciers and permafrost are at risk, from the European Alps to the Andes, Waller said.

In the US, the Medenhall Glacier perched above Alaska’s capital Juneau drains into the Suicide Basin lake which frequently bursts its banks, sending floodwater sweeping downstream toward the city, washing away homes.

Last year, the Swiss village of Blatten was completely buried after a glacier collapsed, sending millions of tons of ice and rock down mountainside. Scientists believe it may have been linked to thawing permafrost, causing rocks to tumble onto the glacier, destabilizing it. 

Houses submerged in water arriving on August 24, 2025 at Blatten, Switzerland. On May 28, millions of cubic meters of rock tumbled down from Kleiner Nesthorn mountain onto the Birch Glacier, sending rock, ice and mud crashing into the valley. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 

Early warning is increasingly critical. Nepal’s warning systems likely saved many lives downstream, said Hannah Cloke, a professor of meteorology and climate change at the University of Reading in the UK. But high in the mountains “there is often very little time between the triggering event and the impact, making warnings exceptionally difficult,” she said.

One scientist estimated the Nepal-China flood wave roared down the first nearly 14 miles at a speed of 120 mph

 

It’s fiendishly difficult to know further in advance which of the country’s glaciers may be on course to collapse. Monitoring each of Nepal’s 3,000 glaciers closely would be “extremely challenging,” said ICIMOD’s Baral.

There is hope, however, in new satellite systems which could be a “game changer” for Nepal and other countries, Shugar said.

This could be a vital step as the planet’s majestic, icy mountains continue to draw people to them, putting them directly in the path of the increasingly deadly and unpredictable hazards they are likely to unleash as the world warms.

Snow and ice on Swiss glaciers melting at alarming rate amid heatwave, expert says

 

Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice and snow due to the heatwave battering Europe. Photograph: freeartist/Alamy

 Accumulation on Switzerland’s glaciers from last winter expected to all be gone by Monday amid ‘enormous’ melt rates across Alps

 Agence France-Presse

 

Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave battering Europe, according to the head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (Glamos).

The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.

All further melting between now and October will see the size of glaciers in the Swiss Alps shrink.

In data going back to 2000, the only time that the tipping point arrived even earlier was in 2022, when it came on 26 June. The grim scenario is driven by the current heatwave, as well as the one in May – both coming on the back of another winter with poor snowfall.

“We’re just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the Alps,” Glamos network chief Matthias Huss told AFP on Friday, as multiple Swiss weather stations registered new all-time records.

 

“We are three months too early compared to a healthy state.”

This century, the tipping point, on average, has been reached in mid-August – already bad news for the nation’s glaciers, which are shrinking at a staggering rate.

Much of the water that flows into the Rhine and the Rhone – two of Europe’s major rivers – comes from the Alpine glaciers.

Huss said he had just returned from the Rhone Glacier and that in the 10 days since his previous visit “there was one metre of ice melted in the vertical direction – one metre of melting within just the last 10 days”.

 

“It’s very impressive to see, and this is just the effect of the heatwave.”

“The more days that are added that are very high temperatures, not even mattering whether it’s 35C or 40C, this is just very bad for the glaciers.”

Huss said the “very bad state of the glaciers at the moment” was down to a “combination of bad circumstances”, including less snowfall and the arrival of dust from the Sahara desert in March.

He said 2026 was “surprisingly similar” to 2022, which for glaciers was “by far the most extreme year ever recorded in the Alps, with melt rates shattering everything we had seen before”.

He said this year had seen 25% less snow replenishing the surface of the glaciers compared with the 2010-20 figures. Meanwhile May was warm, causing the snowpack to disappear earlier.

Glaciers in the Swiss Alps began to retreat about 170 years ago, initially modestly, but in recent decades melting has accelerated significantly as the climate warms.

The volume of Swiss glaciers shrank by 38% between 2000 and 2024. Huss said Switzerland had already lost 1,200 glaciers in the past 50 years, and now only 1,300 were left.

“Those lost were small glaciers, but they were still relevant in peripheral regions of the Alps,” the glaciologist said.

“If warming continues as it did over the last decades, by 2100 we will only be left with some little remnants of ice.”

Glaciers to reach peak rate of extinction in the Alps in eight years

Alpinists train on the Mer de Glace in France. Like nearly all of Europe's glaciers, it is melting fast. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

by  Damian Carrington Environment editor

 Climate crisis forecast to wipe out thousands of glaciers a year globally, threatening water supplies and cultural heritage

 Glaciers in the European Alps are likely to reach their peak rate of extinction in only eight years, according to a study, with more than 100 due to melt away permanently by 2033. Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then.

 

The melting of glaciers driven by human-caused global heating is one of the clearest signs of the climate crisis. Communities around the world have already held funeral ceremonies for lost glaciers, and a Global Glacier Casualty List records the names and histories of those that have vanished.

About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the research indicates this pace will accelerate rapidly as emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to be released into the atmosphere.

Current climate action plans from governments are forecast to push global temperatures to about 2.7C above preindustrial levels, supercharging extreme weather. Under this scenario, glacier losses would peak at about 3,000 a year in 2040 and plateau at that rate until 2060. By the end of the century, 80% of today’s glaciers will have gone.

By contrast, rapid cuts to carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cap annual losses at about 2,000 a year in 2040, after which the rate would decline.

 

Glacier collapses, burying evacuated Swiss village in mud and rocks – video

 Previous studies have focused on the volume of ice lost, given its contribution to rising sea levels that threaten coastal towns and cities. Individual glaciers, however, are also important as water sources and tourist attractions for many communities, and often have spiritual significance for local people. This prompted the researchers to analyse the number of glaciers disappearing.

 

Matthias Huss, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a member of the study team, said: “As glaciologists, we do not only model the disappearance of glaciers globally, but we are very directly concerned with this loss of glaciers in our daily work.”

As the director of the Swiss glacier monitoring network, Huss recently declared four extinct, the latest in an estimated 1,000 lost in the country over the past three decades.

Huss also spoke at a funeral ceremony for the Pizol glacier in 2019. “More than 250 people climbed up to this glacier to say goodbye. It was very impressive.”

Such funerals have also taken place in Iceland, Nepal and elsewhere. “People climb up to these vanishing glaciers to say goodbye for themselves, but also to send out a strong signal to the public to tell them it matters to us.”

The Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere in New Zealand is experiencing substantial ice loss. Photograph: Jon Bower New Zealand/Alamy

Many glaciers hold spiritual significance, for example Māori culture regard them as ancestors. The Māori political leader Nā Lisa Tumahai visited the melting Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere in 2022 and told the Global Glacier Casualty List: “This mighty glacier, a presence once so physically commanding, is shrinking into oblivion. [It] has been subdued, humiliated by the actions of humans.

“To see this retreating giant is to understand impermanence, to understand the real and terrible results of industrialisation, of climate change.”

The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, analysed more than 200,000 glaciers from a database of outlines derived from satellite images. The researchers used three global glacier models to assess their fate under different heating scenarios.

Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined’. Region known as ‘world’s refrigerator’ is heating up as much as four times as quickly as global average, Noaa experts say

 

This aerial view shows icebergs and ice sheets floating in the water off Nuuk, Greenland, on 07 March 2025. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

by Oliver Milman

The Arctic endured a year of record heat and shrunken sea ice as the world’s northern latitudes continue a rapid shift to becoming rainier and less ice-bound due to the climate crisis, scientists have reported.

From October 2024 to September 2025, temperatures across the entire Arctic region were the hottest in 125 years of modern record keeping, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said, with the last 10 years being the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

The Arctic is heating up as much as four times as quickly as the global average, due to the burning of fossil fuels, and this extra heat is warping the world’s refrigerator – a region that acts as a key climate regulator for the rest of the planet.

 

The maximum extent of sea ice in 2025 was the lowest in the 47-year satellite record, Noaa reported on in its annual Arctic report card. This is the latest landmark in a longer trend, with the region’s oldest, thickest ice declining by more than 95% since the 1980s as the Arctic becomes hotter and rainier.

This year was a record for precipitation in the Arctic. Much of this is not settling as snow – the June snow cover extent over the Arctic today is half of what it was six decades ago.

 “This year was the warmest on record and had the most precipitation on record – to see both of those things happen in one year is remarkable,” said Matthew Langdon Druckenmiller, an Arctic scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado and an editor of the Arctic report card. “This year has really underscored what is to come.”

 

Scientists have been struck by how exceptional warmth in other seasons, particularly summer, is now becoming evident in winter too, affecting the annual growth of sea ice across the Arctic in its coldest months. In the past month or so, sea ice extent has been the lowest on record, potentially heralding another reduced maximum for sea ice next year.

“There’s been a steady decline in sea ice and unfortunately we are seeing rain now even in winter,” said Druckenmiller. “We are seeing changes in the heart of winter, when we expect the Arctic to be cold. The whole concept of winter is being redefined in the Arctic.”

These changes are acutely felt by people and wildlife in the Arctic – rain falling on to snow can freeze into a barrier that makes it harder for animals to forage for food, while also making for more slippery, hazardous conditions for people traveling by road. The retreat of glaciers can also cause potentially dangerous flooding, as seen in Juneau, Alaska, this year.

The loss of sea ice is opening up vast areas of dark ocean, which is absorbing, rather than reflecting, more of the heat that is raising global temperatures. While the melting sea ice isn’t itself causing the seas to rise, the loss of land-based glaciers is, with Noaa reporting that the huge Greenland ice sheet lost 129bn tons of ice in 2025. This will add to sea level rise that will menace coastal cities for generations to come.

“We are seeing cascading impacts from a warming Arctic,” said Zack Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central. “Coastal cities aren’t ready for the rising sea levels, we have completely changed the fisheries in the Arctic which leads to rising food bills for sea food. We can point to the Arctic as a far away place but the changes there affect the rest of the world.”

Melting glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to redraw part of Alpine border. Two countries agree to modifications beneath Matterhorn peak, one of Europe’s highest summits

The Matterhorn straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley. Photograph: Ascent/PKS Media Inc/Getty Images

 

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn a border that traverses an Alpine peak as melting glaciers shift the historically defined frontier.

The two countries agreed to the modifications beneath the Matterhorn, one of the highest mountains in Europe, which straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley.

Glaciers in Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, are retreating at an accelerated pace because of human-caused climate breakdown.

“Significant sections of the border are defined by the watershed or ridge lines of glaciers, firn or perpetual snow,” the Swiss government said in a statement cited by Bloomberg. “These formations are changing due to the melting of glaciers.”

 The famed Zermatt ski resort is affected by the change, with the two countries agreeing to modify the border around the landmarks of Testa Grigia, Plateau Rosa, Rifugio Carrel and Gobba di Rollin based on their economic interests, Bloomberg reported.

A joint Italian-Swiss commission agreed to the changes in May 2023. Switzerland officially approved the treaty on Friday, but Italy still needs to sign.

The changes come after a disagreement between the two countries over the peak’s territory that lasted for years.

Swiss glaciers lost 4% of their volume in 2023, the second-biggest annual decline on record, according to the Swiss Academy of Sciences. The largest decline was 6% in 2022.

Experts have stopped measuring the ice on some Swiss glaciers because there is none left.

The remains of a German mountain climber who disappeared while crossing a glacier near the Matterhorn nearly 40 years ago were discovered in melting ice in July last year.

 

Experts in Italy said this month that the Marmolada glacier, which is the largest and most symbolic of the Dolomites, could melt completely by 2040 as a result of rising average temperatures.

The collapse of part of the Marmolada killed 11 people in 2022.

The glacier has been measured every year since 1902 and is considered a “natural thermometer” of climate change.