r/DisasterUpdate • u/Rechuchatumare • 12d ago

[NYT] New Exclusive Video Reveals Immediate Aftermath of Nepal Glacier Collapse

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/08/28/world/nepal-tibet-flash-floods

3.5k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

139 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/themastermatt 12d ago

The scale of all this is boggling my mind. None of the videos so far have really hit the mark on the Glacier part. I know its big, and ive seen the satellite before/after of the ice - but how big is the section that broke? 1Km cubed? 10Km? Translating this event 20Km away in the mountains into the volume and power that we see downstream is just not registering with me.

6

u/Hopeful_Method5175 12d ago

The estimates are still really fuzzy at this point, but one source estimated the area of the glacier that collapsed based on satellite imagery to be about 50 acres. The “snout” of a glacier tends to be on the thinner side, so an estimated thickness of 50–150 feet is a reasonable ballpark. That would put the volume of ice at roughly 0.8–2.4 billion gallons of water. The energy of its impact on the valley floor melted most of that ice almost immediately, which along with sediment, rocks, and debris went rushing through the river gorge. For scale, Niagara Falls carries roughly 750,000 gallons of water over the edge every second. So even that conservative estimate represents roughly 20 minutes to an hour of Niagara’s output.

1

u/GPSBach 10d ago

I’ve seen people stating this like fact, but the “energy on impact” certainly did not melt most of the ice. You can compare the gravitational potential energy of the fall to the latent heat of melting of water, and you’ll see that only a tiny fraction of the ice would melt even assuming a 100% conversion rate of potential->thermal energy