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: The cause of the huge floods and debris flow on the border between Nepal and Tibet, which have caused hundreds of deaths, appears to have been an ice avalanche—the result of a huge piece of a glacier collapsing and cascading down the mountain more than 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) to the valley floor. The Conversation asked Jonathan Bamber, a professor of glaciology at the University of Bristol, about the risks of glaciers melting faster than ever.
The greater Himalayan region, called High Mountains Asia (HMA), is often referred to as the third pole because it contains more glacier ice than anywhere outside the polar regions. Many of those glaciers lie along the northern border of Nepal and China, forming an east-west arc of the Himalayas. Tibet is an autonomous region of China.
Eight of the 14 peaks rise above 8,000 m (26,250 feet) and lie in Nepal. Its northern half is extremely mountainous and precipitous, making it susceptible to landslides, rockfalls and glacier-related hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods and ice cliff collapses. When glaciers flow over steep bedrock slopes, the ice fractures into what are called seracs: ice cliffs that are inherently unstable and break off from time to time.
It should come as no surprise that in a warming world, ice melts faster. Since the start of the industrial revolution, typically taken to be 1850, the world has warmed by 1.4°C. However, that warming is a global average, and there are large regional variations.
The Arctic has warmed by more than double that amount, and the Himalayan region has also warmed by more than the global average. The rate of warming has accelerated significantly over the past four decades. As a consequence, glaciers around the world have been melting faster.
The most comprehensive assessment of glacier melting, called glacier mass balance, combines satellite observations with ground-based data to reconstruct melt rates from 1976 to 2024. It finds that the rate is greater for the most recent decade than the long-term mean for every region except Iceland. For the HMA, the increase is about 25%.
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