Nepal's glacier time bomb
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabacal and Gadigal people. There's a word you often hear in the days following a natural disaster.
The aftermath of what was Jamaica's strongest storm on record. The word is aftermath. The Quake's aftermath, now a race against time. Rescue workers trying to find survivors and listening for voices under the rubble. The aftermath still being felt right across the territory.
Most natural disasters have an aftermath. A period of time after the initial threat is gone, where rescue and recovery operations can begin. The thing about glacier collapses, like the one that's happened in Nepal in August, is there isn't really a clear aftermath. The threat doesn't actually go away. And that's because when a glacier collapse happens, the initial disastrous flood can create the conditions for floods to happen again. And again.
Fragile barrier lake has formed at the border of Tibet and Nepal, which holds millions of cubic meters of water.
The debris from the initial flood creates fragile dams which then fill and
breach. That can be very, very dangerous because they can easily be breached and then release massive amounts of debris, water, and rocks down valley.
In the days after the disaster, Chinese and Nepali rescuers walked through the scoured valley floor, banging on rocks and shouting into the mud in searching for survivors. They're shouting Is anybody here? But these rescuers are still in terrible danger.
Authorities are warning a second flood could be imminent.
In satellite pictures taken in the days after the initial catastrophic landslide, you can see several new lakes being formed. One has already collapsed, triggering a secondary flood. And it will just keep going, potentially for months. It's unclear when the aftermath of this disaster will actually start. As climate change causes glaciers to recede, melt, and collapse, there's not much the people living in the Himalayas and other glacier adjacent areas can do about the catastrophic landslides like the one we saw in August. But those landslides are comparatively rare. The lakes that are formed by the glacier movements are actually the more pervasive threat. These lakes that glaciers and landslides leave behind are killing people and destroying property every single year.
And the thing is, there is actually a solution to that problem.
Engineers know how to deal with the threat of these lakes. They have done it before. And yet every year the flooding continues. Today, a real thing that we can really do to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change, and the story of why that is still being made unnecessarily complicated. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening. Okay, let's talk about how a glacier works.
A glacier consists of ice and snow that has been packed and frozen for thousands of years. concealing uncharted mountains, valleys, and lakes.
The reason I've gone into like school educational video mode here is because I'm Australian, and here in Australia we really don't know anything about glaciers.
Glaciers are found on every continent of the world except Australia. See? No
glaciers here.
Ask
me about sharks and bushfires
though. The glacier relentlessly grinds away as a mighty river of ice down the mountain. Creeping forward only a few feet a day.
Many glaciers are hundreds of meters deep and stretch on for kilometers before they reach a natural endpoint. The ones in polar regions tend to terminate at the ocean, where big chunks of ice break off, and those ice chunks become icebergs, which then float off to terrorize overconfident ocean liners. And then there are the ones located in mountain regions closer to the equator.
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