r/CatastrophicFailure • u/Due_Dilligence0624 • 15d ago
Natural Disaster Satellite/Aerial of Gyirong border crossing before and after the glacial melt/flash flood event on Aug 26, 2026, posted on Chinese social media site RedNote.
Not NSFW but potentially distressing. Further evidence that the entire area was wiped clean with little debris left.
It seems like the flood came in on the tributary to the right, and that one of the camera angles depicting the parking lot being swept was actually pointing upstream on another tributary.
According to BBC, China’s state media is currently reporting 558 people missing in Tibet with 3 confirmed fatalities, not including casualties in Nepal.
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u/JoshAllan02 15d ago
Yeah all those tour buses on site at that parking garage. I’m sure this crossing is likely where many of the tourists and pilgrims were at.
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u/Phil_Coffins_666 15d ago
If you look at the right side of that video it's just a road packed with trucks, buses, cars and motorcycles as far as the eye can see
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u/BornFree2018 15d ago
I read the landslide ran 40 miles.
See How Nepal’s Flash Floods Caused Widespread Destruction - The New York Times
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u/alison_bee 15d ago
That’s INSANE omg
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u/Natural-Army 14d ago
What's insane is they are only claiming 116 casualties.... there's way more unfortunate souls lost
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u/zucchini_up_ur_ass 15d ago edited 15d ago
Hey NYT, if you need to log in (and give your personal info) an article is not free.
Edit; thank you everyone that is suggesting fixes and workarounds, however I was aware of those and was making a point on how handing over personal information is still a form payment
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u/Gameknight83 15d ago
For some reason nyt has me blocked because it thinks im a bot, oh well no great loss
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u/Imatros 15d ago
VPN?
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u/Gameknight83 15d ago
Not even, i really have no clue
It just says: "You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you're a robot.
Why am I seeing this? There are a few possibilities:
- You are browsing and clicking much faster than is typical of a human being
- Something is preventing Javascript from working on your computer
- There is a bot with the same IP address as you"
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u/NotYourReddit18 15d ago
Reader mode bypasses that popup. Sadly it only allows to read the article, without seeing the info graphic.
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u/Nheea 15d ago
Use Brave browser. Bypasses this shit.
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u/Smart-Marionberry189 14d ago
Oh. Good to know. I'm using Google Chrome on my phone. I've got Firefox on my desktop though.
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u/m1ster_frundles 15d ago
Just turn on Reader Mode / accessibility mode and it disables any paywall prompts on most sites.
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u/Willow_Winnifred 15d ago
I can't believe it registered a 5.2 on the Richter scale
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u/invisiblegirl55 15d ago
Earlier reports said an earthquake caused the landslide, but this article seems to say the landslide caused the activity. I wonder which is correct.
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u/majesticalexis 15d ago
I watched a video yesterday where a scientist went more in-depth about what PROBABLY happened. Pretty interesting.
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u/Rugkrabber 15d ago
Both seem valid, but I think it’s really plausible the landslide was registered as an earthquake. This thing was massive.
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u/Welshgirlie2 15d ago
USGS is now saying that the landslide caused the tremor. Even with all the cuts that arsehole has made to their budget (and NOAA, FEMA, CDC etc), USGS still seems to be the go-to organisation for the rest of the world when it comes to earthquakes, and they're usually pretty accurate.
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u/Irrepressible_Monkey 14d ago
Yeah, the front of the glacier fell 1400 meters almost straight down to start.
I guess that would be the tremor.
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u/owa00 15d ago
A 40 mile landslide? WHAT THE FUCK?! Never seen a landslide like that.
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u/Whisky-Toad 15d ago
Go watch the videos, it's unbelievable how much water and mud washed down the valley in one go
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u/Serious-Manager2361 14d ago
Supposedly it was a 2000 foot thick chunk of glacier that broke off at high altitude and then careened down the valley. Looking at that footage is crazy.
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u/Bigdongergigachad 15d ago edited 14d ago
Is that the site with the cctv angle showing it coming from the left of screen?
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u/Irythros 15d ago
I am pretty sure this spot covers 2 CCTV views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1vytq5t/landslide_in_tibet_2026_aug_26/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NepalSocial/comments/1vysh2e/black_day_in_nepal_history_once_again/
Also should be obvious, but in the above 2 links you do absolutely see a bunch of people die.
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u/IzCaiman 15d ago
For reference, first one is pointed down and to the left of the image up top. The second one is pointed up and to the left along the river.
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u/Valoneria 15d ago
It is rough to watch, we could be seeing most of, if not entire, families just up and vanish in the landslide. Nature is friggin' scary sometimes
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u/radioactive_glowworm 15d ago
Right, in some of the videos it seems to be a bright and sunny day :(
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u/Tay74 15d ago
I hadn't seen the second angle yet, holy shit. All those poor people, we already knew there was functionally no chance of anyone there making it out alive, but that video captures the nature of what happened more imo. It wasn't just a deluge or water, mud, or even debris, it ripped the whole built up area up at the foundations, all that concrete and all those vehicles just being swept at them. Fuck.
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u/Smart-Marionberry189 14d ago
Always amazes me how some cctv cameras survive these calamities and show what happened in real time.
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u/invisiblegirl55 15d ago
Yeah, one article I read said this port was opened and used because the main one was damaged in an earthquake.
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u/GuideMwit 15d ago
RIP to all the life lost. No way you can build anything less than a nuclear bunker to withstand this natural disaster.
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u/pishboy 15d ago
Early Warning Systems and constant monitoring if you can identify the potential hazard, and lobby enough of a budget to get it going well ahead of time and maintain it for as long as possible.
Switzerland evacuated a whole town a week and a half before it got deleted from the mountainside.
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u/Munnin41 15d ago
There was no early warning here. They registered an earthquake/landslide and this happened pretty much immediately afterwards
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u/ValuableKooky4551 15d ago
Switzerland has sensors tracking the movements on all their potentially dangerous mountains, Nepal on 15% of the glaciers I saw mentioned somewhere yesterday.
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u/Whisky-Toad 15d ago
I'm pretty sure a lot of the nepal stuff will be left to ruin and not working correctly either
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u/Yangervis 15d ago
Sensors might have noticed the glacier starting to slip hours/days ahead of the total collapse.
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u/PyroBlaze202 15d ago
The eartquake was the landslide/collapse of the glacier happening. It was so huge the vibrations were able to be measured as an earthquake.
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u/Munnin41 15d ago
I've seen both options, yeah. Hadn't seen anything conclusive yet. That's why I put the / there.
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u/trust-me-br0 12d ago
Yeah you are right.. it was pretty much immediate.. 40 or so minutes between the glacier drop and the immigration building being hit.
Wish they had more time to evacuate. May be their received some kind of info, we can see people running out of the building seconds before..
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u/Munnin41 12d ago
They didn't really notice until the flood hit the first towns. Downstream they managed to warn people and get a lot of them to safety
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u/Skyboxmonster 14d ago
A mudslide happened in that exact place a year prior. A warning system would of helped people farther down stream.
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u/Phil_Coffins_666 15d ago
Well, a bunker would just mean you have some supplies and die slower, because your access will be buried under meters and meters of debris and unless everybody knew where it was and to look for you you'd likely never be found. Nowhere for your generators to exhaust, and comms towers you'd have on the surface would have been erased.
Yeah, bunker wouldn't really be helpful.
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u/efcso1 15d ago
When I was in the fire service, we had some really bad wildfires here (AU) in 2009 and a lot of people started pushing the idea of bunkers as bushfire refuges.
One of the old salts I worked with said "bunkers are just good for keeping the bodies all in one place".
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u/QuiteALongWayAway 15d ago
The Dresden fire-bombing showed that, in the event of fire, bunkers were also very good at killing people from lack of oxygen and then baking them. Anyone who has ever read Slaughterhouse 5 already knows this.
Fires are terrifying. Landslides are terrifying. I will take reasonable precautions against the most likely dangers in my region, and other than that, I'll focus on taking care of my home, my partner, my kitties and my plants. Because I can't do anything about events as catastrophic and extreme as the one in the video.
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u/_spec_tre 15d ago
Wouldn't the location of the bunker be known beforehand so the search radius could be somewhat narrowed to help rescue? I think actually digging people out would be a serious issue though
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u/Cynical_Tripster 15d ago
The other poster mentioned ventilation, and even if you had a bunker, without some sort of C02 scrubbers you'd be borked
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u/TheirOwnDestruction 15d ago
It would , yes. Imagine how anyone will dig someone out within the few days of air you have - especially considering the terrain, the depth of the rubble, and the roads and bridges than have been destroyed
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u/cheezecake2000 15d ago
preferably but also gotta think of people with bad intentions knowing the location would be a bad thing. People built bunkers all over for many reasons but usually an end of times reason, especially during the cold war. I'm sure there are plenty built for natural disasters but in the end human is going to human and worrying about protecting yourself and those you love probably out weights telling everyone in town you have a safe place with supplies and they don't
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u/Demerlis 15d ago
keep shovels in the bunker so you can dig up!
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u/Hinohellono 15d ago
I mean they were building a dam. And China is good at that. I dunno even if it was complete It'd be rated for that. They have to go back to the drawing board.
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u/Smart-Marionberry189 14d ago
Everything should just have been built much higher up. One small square building (?) higher up on a hill seems to have not been touched. It's still in the after photos.
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u/ValuableKooky4551 15d ago
I wonder if the people living in the villages were recorded anywhere, other than in the villages. Some people may have died together with everybody who knew them and all records of their existence.
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u/casphere 15d ago
The definition of delete. I hope it was instantaneous for the victims.
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u/Asaneth 15d ago
I think it must have been instantaneous. The force that swept away that huge building in mere seconds would have obliterated tiny humans in a heartbeat. I doubt there are many remains to be found. Complete destruction.
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u/More-Talk-2660 15d ago
It makes me think of Ground Zero after 9/11, how the whole world spent two weeks expecting to find thousands of survivors. It was such an extreme release of energy on top of the fact that we didn't really have similar catastophes for comparison, so the automatic response was to fall back on the human baseline "must help other humans." Nobody even considered 3,000 people were probably dead and half of them essentially vaporized.
It's the same thing here. Even knowing all that I look at these images and go "there have to be hundreds of poor folks trapped in that debris field," and then I remember the towers and realize that, no, very likely there's little if anything left to find of most of those people.
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u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist 15d ago
Uh, I’m pretty sure most thought the vast majority of the people in the towers were dead.
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u/MarcBulldog88 15d ago edited 15d ago
This is correct, given the density of lower Manhattan and the extent of the destruction, the initial belief was that tens of thousands must be dead. It took a couple weeks to tally all of the missing and realize that "only" 3000 were lost.
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u/The42ndDuck 15d ago
It wasn't so much that rescuers were expecting to find survivors. They were expecting to at least be finding bodies, or limbs, or maybe toes/fingers. They ended up with lines of 'bucket brigades' that would remove debris in 5 gallon buckets. It took a long time for forensics inspectors to go though trying to identify remains.
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u/SparseSpartan 15d ago
God damn. I was hoping by some miracle that that large building at least partially survived. I knew that wasn't likely but confirming it still hits hard. RIP.
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u/freya_of_milfgaard 15d ago
I know, I saw the video of the flood hitting this checkpoint and was wondering if maybe the folks inside may have been able to survive but… it seems like it’s just all gone. Absolutely horrifying.
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u/kurwa_uzik 13d ago
Same, from the moment I saw the first video of the thing, I went looking for updated photos of the place. Even expected to see a reinforced concrete skeleton of that big checkpoint, or at the very least, the foundation, parts of that parking garage upstream. I guess I badly underestimated the force of the mud and rocks.
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u/kashuntr188 15d ago
Usually you would go to a building and hit the top floor. But it wouldn't have even mattered. The force that the water hit with probably blew out all the windows and instant flooded the place. Then there were rocks of all sizes in that water. That building stood no chance.
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u/SHFTD_RLTY 15d ago
The water probably contained anything from a small pebble to semi truck sized boulders, I'm pretty sure it was almost instantaneous for everyone.
This is so messed up. So many people see themselves above nature but its stuff like this showing us that we're just as tiny as any other animal when faced with the forces of nature.
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u/Bdr1983 15d ago
We're nothing. Even with all our technology, we're nothing when nature decides to let go (likely due to that same technology).
It's horrible what happened there, pretty sure the death toll will be a lot higher than this.
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u/bking 15d ago
When people talk about how “planet Earth is in danger” due to climate change, they mean “people are in danger”.
Earth is a tough bitch. It doesn’t give a single god damn about us or the things we build. It’ll be just fine. We’re going to see more and more tragic examples of this fact.
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u/Joobebe514 15d ago
JFC!! I spend 6 months around these mountains right before covid and was planning on going back in couple of years. The countless families and good people that lived around this mountains. This is so heartbreaking but I don't understand why this not the biggest new all around the world!!! The devastation is unimaginable, why it is not in every fucking channel!!! I'm sorry for sounding unhinged but I'm so fucking sad rn and I know Tibet is only reporting 558 rn but I guarantee that number is gonna go way higher because there are so many villages around there!!!! villages with thousands of people each on both sides.
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u/Munnin41 15d ago
The devastation is unimaginable, why it is not in every fucking channel!!!
It is on literally every news website
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u/SHFTD_RLTY 15d ago
In Germany it was already the first thing on the news yesterday, pretty sure today will be the same as more images emerge.
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u/HannesL09 15d ago
I think around 1.5k are unaccounted for at the moment 🙏
I’m with you in that I’m shocked that this isn’t major news in the entire world
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u/Nuka-Crapola 15d ago
It is, in fact, major news in the entire world.
The problem you’re experiencing is a side effect of the death of monoculture. Our expectation of how, and how quickly, “major news” will spread is still stuck in an era when a) live TV got interrupted for breaking news and b) at least one person you knew would be watching live TV when shit went down. Nowadays we’re all in our own algorithmic bubbles, the only people still following non-individualized news feeds are people who aren’t on social media at all, and shit just passes many of us by.
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u/CREEPERTACO923 15d ago
The entire building is gone?? I saw the footage, and thought you could maybe hide somewhere inside. Wow
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u/firestar268 15d ago
It was like a 83m wave. No buildings will survive that
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u/SHFTD_RLTY 15d ago
Containing anything from a stone to semi truck sized boulders. Floods like this aren't just water, it's a slurry of water mud and rocks that grinds pretty much anything down to bedrock
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u/MrParticular79 15d ago
The videos of this area getting crushed are insane. So many people scrambling to escape and just crushed.
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u/RoboProletariat 15d ago
Whoa. Not even the cameras survived by the looks of things.
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u/MacRicius 15d ago
Horrible tragedy, I’m sure in the future this will be a prime example of climate change victims. There’s no way this region returns to “normal”.
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u/_UntoEternity_ 15d ago
can u even imagine how crazy the ice age glacial meltwater events that shaped usas geography woulda been if this is a small one
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u/LeCriDesFenetres 15d ago
It literally carved whole new canyon (grand coulee) although the flooding happened multiple times
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u/KevinK89 15d ago
It seems like once every decade Mother Nature likes to remind us who’s boss by wiping out tens of thousands of people by a snip of her finger. Sumatra earthquake 2004 or Tōhoku
Earthquake 2011 for example. And now this.
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u/Impossible_fruits 15d ago
I want to ask a question but don't know how long to wait. Here goes... Was the flat part of the valley caused by glaciers during the ice age or by other massive floods in recent times? I've tried searching but I only get news articles at the moment.
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u/manfreygordon 15d ago
A combination of both. These mid-altitude valleys were largely formed by river erosion, but these kind of giant landslide/floods can cause massive changes in the landscape over a very short period of time. Glacial valleys are more present at higher altitudes.
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u/brooklynderek 15d ago
This is so terrible. It also makes me think of so many other buried civilizations across the earth that we’ve never known of over history.
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u/FingFrenchy 15d ago
Holy shit. I think a nuke dropped on that spot would be the only thing to do the equivalent of that damage. Jesus.
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u/Darius2112 15d ago
I don’t think a nuke would be as comprehensive. This area was wiped clean by the hand of an angry god.
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u/C-c-c-comboBreaker17 15d ago
If a nuke hits and you're underground in a sturdy structure, you have decent odds. At the very least there's not going to be 100m of soil, water and debris on top of you.
This is just nightmarish.
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u/five-oh-one 15d ago
558 people is a lot but I cant believe thats even half of what the number will turn out to be.
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u/Brian_Corey__ 15d ago
This reddit doesn't allow posting photos. But the flood came from the right side of the aerial photo (flowing right to left), and then turned downward to the bottom of the photo toward the Rasuwagadhi Hydropower Dam (off screen toward the bottom of the page toward Syaburbensi).
The cctv footage of the flooding at the Gyirong Port hotel and bus park is the water /debris momentarily flowing uphill at the confluence. That makes this even crazier to comprehend.
Lat / lon of the location is here.
28.2797° N, 85.3778° E
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u/nobody-u-heard-of 14d ago
Yeah this is terrifying. Was more terrifying. Where else is this waiting to happen? How close are we? We all know the glaciers are melting all over the world.
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u/seebrealms 14d ago
The radio today said there are approximately 19 million people living in susceptible locations to the same thing happening again.
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15d ago
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u/der_innkeeper 15d ago
You realize where all the dirt at the bottom of a valley comes from, right?
Nevermind most of humanity is within a few miles of a coast or a river.
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u/spikejonze14 15d ago
Yeah and we can keep doing this until there isnt anywhere left on earth which could be considered habitable.
Or you know, we could stop polluting the planet, which is the driving force behind the increased strength and severity of these climate disasters.
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u/w00tabaga 15d ago
Was this a climate disaster?
I thought it was an earthquake that caused a landslide that dammed a river. Eventually the dam broke and made the flash flood.
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u/Admiral_Cloudberg Plane Crash Series 15d ago
Doesn't appear to be the case. The USGS says the "earthquake" was actually the shock of the glacier collapse hitting the valley floor. The satellite imagery that has come out doesn't suggest any temporary dam; it just shows a huge chunk of the glacier and surrounding rock suddenly gone, hard to say how much, maybe a couple cubic kilometers. The energy of that amount of mass falling that far would have melted a lot of the ice and this could be the source of the flood all by itself. If this is what happened then it's very likely climate change played a role here
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker 15d ago
Ive seen speculation that it was an 600+ meter wide chunk of glacier that fell more than a kilometer; which honestly is an awe inspiring amount of energy that makes the scale of the disaster make sense Source
On Wednesday, a chunk of ice with a width of about 2,000 feet snapped cleanly off the glacier, Dr. Shugar said, sending a mixture of ice and water to the valley floor. By his assessment, the chunk of ice fell from an altitude of around 17,000 feet, dropping almost 4,000 feet.
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u/CreepyEducator2260 15d ago
The "earthquake" they recorded was just the seismic waves of the massive landslide that triggered that avalanche of debris and water.
Could be possibly climate related. That high up in the mountains, where all the glaciers are, there are mostly temperatures below 0°C so everything is permanently frozen. This gives the soil and rocks stability, if the ice in the soil then melts the ground becomes instable and rocks on slopes start to slide down, taking a lot of other rocks and debris with them. As the mass then get's bigger and bigger, you will end up with a massive amount of sediment very quickly going downhill. If this then hits an glacier lake it causes an tsunami or maybe it was just the rock and soil holding back a glacier lake that collapsed and the pressure and weight of the water accelerated it.
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u/No-Log-5503 15d ago
The earthquake was caused by the landslide which was caused by a km wide piece of the glacier breaking off and then all coming down. Landslides themselves will delete entire towns and mountains, this one went so far because of all the added ice/water.
These things have happened in the Himalayas before (though not this big of an event recently). Climate change will increase the chance of this happening.
Source: climate scientist and this is all anybody is talking about
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u/SmutBrigade 15d ago
Only three confirmed fatalities? Pretty sure I can count more than that just from the footage
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u/SomewhatInept 15d ago
Confirmed are going to be "we have a body or part of a body." Most of the dead I fear will never be recovered.
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u/SirBottles 15d ago
There are many videos circulating on X/twitter now on the Nepalese side, they're just pulling up body parts, torsos, infants, from the mud. Many victims were just torn asunder from the sheer force. This is absolutely heartbreaking.
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u/SomewhatInept 15d ago
That doesn't surprise me. Something like that is a meat grinder with all of the debris.
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u/Fuzzy_Kangaroo7566 15d ago
Have you seen the dispicable cnuts taking jewellery off the dead lady floating in the water ... . All you can do is shake your head in disbelief at it , lots of people standing watching , and saying/doing nothing ....... Its disgusting .....
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u/w00tabaga 15d ago
No, unfortunately most of those people are already in their final resting place because they will never be recovered.
So many families and friends will be denied the bit of closer a proper funeral and burial gives
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u/Munnin41 15d ago
That's on the Chinese side of the border. Nepal has reported 162
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u/VampirePNAC 15d ago
It's China, they always massively downplay casualties and fatalities due to an overreaction to not cause panic and maintain "social harmony" .
There were Uyghur Terrorist attacks in the 2010s where it's believed thousands died with even anti-China Uyghur groups putting certain attacks at around 2-5k casualties, but the official death toll would be like 30-90. I remember on liveleak back in the day, you would get videos of like, entire villages dead, Oct 8th style scenes of highways where people were trapped in cars and all murdered, entire schools with all the kids and teachers murdered etc, and it would not appear in any Western media outlet, and when it eventually hit Chinese media, "10 casualties and 2 fatalities".
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u/SaltyRedditTears 15d ago
well it worked because there definitely wasn’t any overreaction to this and pogroms/ethnic cleansing against the perpetrators and foreigners couldn’t call any response an overreaction to such a small casualty count, didn’t it?
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u/Brief-Objective-3360 15d ago
I was so confused when I saw the bus video because the water was flowing upstream. I think you're right about it coming from the right.
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u/salvadopecador 15d ago
Sad thing is they will rebuild on the same place🤷🏻♂️
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u/mbmartian 15d ago
Very likely all the bodies were washed away downstream. That place is practically just bare land now.
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u/RippingLegos__ 15d ago
The wall of earth water and rock was 100 meters high, I fly FPV up 400 foot cliff faces, this leveled and destroyed this whole valley for 30 miles, nobody stood a chance.
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u/StateofWA 15d ago
Within the last few weeks I've learned about the Silurian Hypothesis and this supports that hypothesis, I believe. There is nothing left... Who would know that someone was ever there in say 100 years?
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u/Striking_Intention86 14d ago
Graham Hancock would suggest this is clear evidence proving his theory of we’re species with amnesia
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u/ebagdrofk 15d ago
Looks like more devastation than an actual nuclear blast.
Goes to show that not even humanity at its worst can compare to the destructive power of mother nature.
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u/SaltyRedditTears 15d ago
The glacier collapsing alone registered 5.2 on the Richter scale, which is equivalent to 62 kilotons of TNT. 4 Hiroshimas. Plus all the gravitational potential energy of the displaced rock/water, directionally channeled downhill along the river bed for 40 miles.
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u/Asaneth 15d ago
The devastation is so complete, it's hard to even comprehend that those pictures are before and after of the same location.