The full extent of the deaths and damage caused by the enormous flash flood that swept down a river valley in Nepal and Tibet today won’t be clear for weeks. But initial analyses of satellite images and seismic data suggest that the collapse of a high glacier caused the disaster.

“There’s a glacier that rolls over a cliff at about 5200 metres,” says at the University of Calgary in Canada. “It’s just like a perfect straight line where it snapped off and dropped over a kilometre vertically to the valley bottom.”

This collapse could be a result of global heating. “It’s not that much of a stretch to think, yes, we’re seeing one terrible ramification of human-caused climate change,” he says.

As the glacier flowed over the cliff and moved down the steep slope, deep crevasses would have formed in the ice. Warm weather in the past day or so may have melted a lot of snow and some glacier ice, with this liquid water weakening the glacier and causing the entire section flowing down the steep slope to collapse.

“Comparing satellite imagery from yesterday and today, the glaciers in the vicinity do seem to have lost a fair bit of snow in the last 24 hours,” says Shugar. “My guess is that snow melt, and glacier ice melt as well, injected a lot of liquid water into the glacier, which percolated down to the bed and lubricated it. That was enough for it to collapse.”

The potential energy released as heat when millions of tonnes of ice fell a kilometre may have melted large quantities of it, producing enough liquid water to generate the huge flash flood.

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“Maybe the glacier breaking is only part of the story and there’s something else that we can’t see yet,” says Shugar. “But as of now, that’s what it looks like.”

The melting of ice due to the release of potential energy caused the Chamoli flash flood in India in February 2021. “In that case, it was a large landslide but with a bit of glacier ice on top of it,” says Shugar. “When that much ice falls, there’s a lot of heat generated and it can melt.”

This event, however, was much larger. “These videos that we’re seeing are off the charts. This is horrific,” he says. “It looks like this will rank very high on the list of historic mountain disasters in terms of people killed, and cost.”

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Some reports have suggested that an earthquake triggered the event, but this isn’t the case, says at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. “I have looked at the data from a few stations in the region, including a station from the Nepali national seismic network near Kathmandu, and we see the event very clearly in this record.”

The record begins with a strong signal of a form typically associated with the mass movement of material, rather than with an earthquake, says Cook. “Then we see a long seismic signal typical of a large debris flow that lasts for hours.”

The initially described the seismic event as an earthquake, but now says further analysis shows it was a landslide.

The signal is similar to one observed during the 2021 Chamoli event, says Cook.

Global heating may have and to the collapse of a glacier above the village of Blatten in Switzerland in 2025. Steep glaciers can break for reasons unrelated to climate change, says Shugar, but an increase in the frequency of this kind of disaster points to warming as a contributing factor.

“Mountain communities around the world, from the Alps to the Andes and the Himalayas, are threatened by increasing intensity and frequency of mountain-related hazards,” said , head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction,. “Their lives, ways of life, culture, and heritage are all threatened.”

“The El Niño has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Niño have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still several months in the future.”

So writes renowned climate scientist James Hansen at Columbia University in New York in .

There are different ways of measuring El Niños, which occur when warm surface waters spread eastwards along the equator across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Hansen thinks the best measure is how much warmer than usual the upper 300 metres of the eastern tropical Pacific becomes.

“Our preferred metric, the heat anomaly in the upper 300 meters of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean… already exceeds the 1997-98 super El Niño,” he writes.

A more common measure, called the Niño3.4 index, is based on how much warmer than usual the sea surface temperature is in the Pacific in the long rectangle between 5 degrees north and south of the equator, and between 120 and 170 degrees west.

“The more common Niño3.4 metric, sea surface temperature… in the equatorial Pacific, also far exceeds prior values,” Hansen writes.

But at the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, says the Niño3.4 index has not yet exceeded previous super El Niños. “The anomaly in Niño3.4 is currently about 2 degrees above the norm which is very high for this time of year but not quite as high as the anomaly at the peak of the 1997/1998 El Niño which was around 2.5 degrees,” Scaife told New Scientist.

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The disagreement on the Niño3.4 index might partly be because this index is usually expressed . By contrast, the daily Niño3.4 value before dropping back slightly.

“In this case, I would agree with Jim,” says at the California Institute for Water Resources. “Niño3.4 values are clearly now the highest on record for the time of year, and are expected to remain so for the rest of the calendar year.”

Using a running mean with a long lag is misleading in a rapidly evolving situation like this, says Swain.

However, during November 2015 the daily Niño3.4 reached nearly 3.1°C, so the current event is not yet as strong as the 2015 one on this measure, either. It appears Hansen meant to say the Niño3.4 index exceeds values for this time of year, as Swain says. New Scientist has asked Hansen for clarification, but had no response at the time of publication.

“Under the standard El Niño metric region it’s still currently the third strongest event on record,” says at Berkeley Earth. “But upper 300m heat is generally a leading indicator of what we will see at the surface.”

“I agree that this El Nino is the biggest on record,” says at the National Center of Atmospheric Research.

What’s clear is that this developing super El Niño will soon exceed previous events on all measures. “I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts,” Scaife said in . “If the forecast is accurate… then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Niño and its worldwide climate influences.”

While Hansen is comparing the developing super El Niño to other modern events for which we have direct temperature records, at Newcastle University in the UK thinks it could also exceed historical events suspected to be even larger.

“The super El Niño evolving in the Pacific will likely be the biggest ever recorded, reaching or exceeding the levels of the 1877-1878 El Niño which caused widespread impacts, including famines and around 50 million deaths (3-4 percent of the global population at the time), mostly across Asia and South America,” Fowler said in a statement.

Every cancer is different. Because of that, researchers have for decades been working on personalised cancer vaccines designed to make the immune system recognise and attack cancers specific to each individual. The results have been mixed, but now a personalised cancer vaccine has produced positive results in a final-stage trial for the first time.

that people who had undergone surgery to remove severe skin cancers, called melanomas, survived longer without the cancer returning or spreading to other parts of the body if they were given a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine in conjunction with another immunotherapy, compared with receiving that immunotherapy alone.

The hope is that this personalised vaccine will work for many other types of cancer. Trials are already underway for . The other big mRNA company, BioNTech, is also testing personalised cancer vaccines in human trials.

What is a cancer vaccine?

Cancers are caused by cells accumulating mutations to the point where they go rogue and start multiplying out of control. Mutations in proteins that protrude from the surface of cells also make cancer cells “look” a bit different to other cells. This allows our immune system to recognise and kill off many cancers without us ever knowing about it. But some cancers slip through the net – the idea of cancer vaccines is to teach the immune system to recognise them.

How are these vaccines made?

In the case of the Moderna vaccine, called , a sample of a person’s cancer – a biopsy – is sequenced. It is then compared with their healthy blood cells to identify surface proteins on the cancerous cells that have distinctive mutations. Up to 34 are selected, and mRNAs coding for those proteins are made and put in the vaccine.

What happens next?

The cancer vaccine is injected into muscles, just like with the covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Cells in the muscles then temporarily produce the cancer proteins, triggering an immune response to them.

Why use mRNA vaccine technology?

It is possible to use other kinds of vaccines, but mRNA has two huge advantages: speed and cost. Making protein-based vaccines requires using living cells, which is time-consuming and requires many safety checks. For people with cancer, the faster a vaccine can be created, the better.

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What immunotherapy was the vaccine combined with for the trial?

It is a so-called anti-PD-1 therapy consisting of an antibody called pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Many cancers evolve to evade immune attack by putting up a “don’t attack me” sign. Immune cells “read” this sign with the help of a protein on their surface called PD-1.

Blocking PD-1 makes the “don’t attack me” sign invisible to immune cells, so they attack regardless. However, anti-PD-1 treatments work only if the immune system is already trying to attack a cancer, hence the advantage of combining them with a cancer vaccine to provoke that attack.

How well did the combined treatment work?

Moderna hasn’t told us yet. The company has announced only that the results of the phase III trial “demonstrate statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements” in survival times.

The trial involved 1137 people who, after surgery to remove melanomas, were randomly assigned to get both the vaccine and pembrolizumab, or just pembrolizumab. What we do know is that in an earlier trial involving 157 people with melanoma over five years, the combination of the vaccine and pembrolizumab cut the risk of recurrence by 50 per cent and the risk of spread to other parts of the body by 60 per cent, compared with pembrolizumab alone.

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When will this treatment become available?

Analysts speaking to the say it could be approved next year. But because it is an individualised treatment, scaling up production will be much more complex than with a standard vaccine.

It also isn’t clear yet what the pricing will be – even with the help of mRNA technology, it won’t be cheap. A suggested it would cost around $200,000 per treatment. No wonder Moderna’s share price is soaring.

Will this work for all cancers?

The hope is it will work for many cancers, but we will have to wait on more phase III trial results to be sure. That said, several other earlier-stage mRNA cancer vaccine trials have produced promising results. In fact, a study last year estimated that on the basis of these results, their potential health benefits could be worth around $75 billion a year in the US alone.

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Are there any approved cancer vaccines already?

Not like intismeran autogene. Some sources will tell you for treating cancer: Provenge, BCG and T-VEC.

But Provenge is a treatment that involves removing immune cells from a person’s body, exposing them to a prostate cancer protein, then replacing them. BCG is the tuberculosis vaccine, which just happens to help treat some bladder cancers for reasons we still don’t understand. And T-VEC is a live herpes simplex virus engineered to kill cancer cells.

So only one of the three is a conventional vaccine, and its anti-cancer action is completely incidental.

What about the HPV and hepatitis vaccines?

These vaccines prevent infections by viruses that can cause cancers, rather than targeting cancers directly, which is an even better approach. The HPV vaccine has proved incredibly effective at preventing cervical cancer, for instance.

Climate models projecting higher warming for a given level of carbon dioxide have been discounted as unrealistic, but a new way of assessing models suggests they are accurate.

“For a given emission trajectory, we expect warming to be 25 per cent higher,” says at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

The conclusion has enormous implications. For instance, a project called the currently projects that average global surface temperatures will rise by 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 if countries implement existing policies. Gyuleva’s team’s results suggest we are instead heading for 3.25°C.

How much the world will warm depends on how much more CO2 we put into the atmosphere and how the planet responds to that CO2. Different climate models vary in how much warming they project for a given CO2 level. For instance, some models suggest that a doubling of CO2 will result in the average global surface temperature increasing by around 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels in the short term. Others suggest it could be as high as 3°C.

“The range is big, and it really matters,” says Gyuleva. “So the point is to find out which ones are right.”

Previously, this was done by using climate models to simulate the recent past. The models are fed data on greenhouse emissions over the past century or so, and their projected climate response is compared with what actually happened.

For the last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a lot of these models simulated more warming than had happened, so were discounted. Based on the remaining models, the panel’s last report concluded that a doubling of CO2 would result in between 1.2°C and 2.4°C of warming in the short term, with a best estimate of 1.8°C.

But there is lots of variability in Earth’s climate. For instance, during the La Niña climate pattern, cooler seawater from deeper down spreads across the ocean, resulting in cooler surface temperatures. So, Gyuleva and her colleagues have filtered the historical climate record to try to remove the effect of variability due to phenomena like La Niña.

Their results suggest that natural variability limited temperature rises between 1981 and 2014 – a period that includes the so-called global warming hiatus in the first decade of the 21st century. “It’s really exactly this period 1981 to 2014, which was used in the previous papers, where you see the strongest bias down,” she says. “It was really bad luck.”

Correcting for this bias alone leads to higher estimates of the warming expected from a doubling of CO2. But Gyuleva’s team also assessed models using a new approach. Instruments on several satellites have been measuring how much short-wave radiation from the sun enters the atmosphere, and how much long-wave radiation is emitted. The difference between how much heat energy enters the atmosphere and how much leaves is the most fundamental measure of global warming.

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So, how well models project the trends in incoming and outgoing radiation as the world warms can be seen as a better measure of their performance than their projections of surface temperatures. But because the satellite measurements required to do this only began in 2001, this kind of assessment has only recently become possible.

The team found the models that best match the observed trends in short-wave and long-wave radiation project much greater warming. Based on the models that perform best at both kinds of assessments, the team concludes that a doubling of CO2 will lead to a rise of between 1.9°C and 2.6°C, with a best estimate of 2.25°C. “Our results need to be confirmed by more evidence from different sources before we can be fully confident,” says Gyuleva.

“This seems to be a sound approach,” says at the University of Oslo in Norway.

“In my opinion, the filtering out of natural variability is a valuable step forward,” says at Duke University in North Carolina, although he isn’t yet convinced that the short-wave and long-wave trends are a good way to assess models.

“I think it’s a plausible conclusion and a reasonable approach,” says at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

But the findings are based on climate models, and none of them reproduces the key phenomena very well, says Sherwood. “To do a better job of this we really need better climate models. On the other hand, the steep temperature rises of the last few years are going to lead to higher estimated ranges regardless of method.”

In climate jargon, what Gyuleva’s team has estimated is known as the transient climate response. It is just one of three types of climate sensitivity, which vary in terms of the timescales involved.

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In the decades after a doubling of CO2, various feedbacks will kick in that lead to further warming, such as the continued warming of the oceans. The response after these medium-term feedbacks have kicked in is known as the equilibrium climate sensitivity. Last year, it was shown that the trends in short-wave and long-wave radiation suggest the equilibrium climate sensitivity is higher than previous estimates.

There are also very slow feedbacks that take centuries or more, such as the melting of ice sheets. Estimates of this earth system sensitivity – the full response to a doubling of CO2 over many millennia – are as high as 7°C.

However, if atmospheric CO2 levels were lowered by carbon removal, some of the longer-term consequences would be avoided.