This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international team of glaciologists and climate scientists, including professor Bethan Davies from Newcastle University, carried out a rapid scientific analysis and identified the role of climate change and its impacts on the high-altitude landscape. More than 1,400 people were killed—and more than 5,000 remain missing—after a massive section of overhanging glacier and rock fell from Langtang Lirung mountain on Aug. 26, 2026.
The collapse caused an enormous water, ice and debris flood that swept downstream, resulting in catastrophic damage. Rather than a single extreme weather event, scientists found that the disaster happened as a compound crisis. Decades of atmospheric warming—caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels—have melted the glacier and pushed the freezing threshold line (0°C isotherm) upward by around 100 meters (328 feet) of altitude per decade.
This has resulted in glacier retreat and thawing of permafrost within rock fractures that historically hold high mountain walls together, rendering them unstable. A massive 2015 earthquake is likely to have further preconditioned the slope for collapse. Professor Bethan Davies, chair in glaciology at Newcastle University, said, "Climate warming, clearly attributed to humans burning fossil fuels, is melting ice and snow in the Himalayas, decreasing glacier coverage and thawing permafrost, destabilizing the mountainsides and leading to an increase in these kinds of disasters.
Urgent action is needed to avoid even faster melt and an increased risk of future disasters." The study was produced by World Weather Attribution, which brought together an international team of scientists with a range of expertise in analyzing the various factors that may have played a role in the rock and ice collapse. This paper is a synthesis of all those factors and of the extent to which—if at all—climate change is influencing them. In addition, the team carried out an attribution analysis using established peer-reviewed methods to look at the role of climate change in raising the July and August temperatures that preceded this collapse, as well as affecting precipitation in the region.
Ben Clarke, extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London, said, "This disaster was not an extreme weather event, but the fingerprints of climate change are still clear to see in long-term changes. While this is a complex event, our analysis brings together scientists with a diverse range of expertise to set out the factors that likely contributed to this catastrophe. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
"We found that climate change is transforming the high-mountain environment, influencing many of the possible drivers of this collapse. This increases the risk in a region that is already exposed to high seismic activity." Professor Walter Immerzeel, mountain hydrologist at Utrecht University, said, "We are witnessing fundamental, irreversible shifts in Himalayan mountain environments. Climate change from the burning of fossil fuels is pushing the freezing line—the zero-degree isotherm—upward by roughly 100 meters (328 feet) per decade, exposing perennially frozen ground and bedrock to periods of thaw that are longer and warmer than before.
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