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.”

When a dangerous landslide hits, rescuers scrambling to assist need to know exactly where to look – and now a new technique for analysing seismic data can do just that, by tracing the source of the disaster to within a few kilometres in mere seconds.

Existing methods can only narrow down locations to within tens of kilometres, says at the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany. In remote areas, this can lead to delays if rescuers are sent to the wrong place. “That time loss can be crucial,” Ursica told a press conference at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna last week.

Many countries have a network of seismic monitors to record activity related to earthquakes and volcanoes. This data can also be used to detect events such as landslides – the risk of which is increasing due to climate change – but the data from these kinds of events is much messier and harder to analyse than that from earthquakes, says Ursica.

There are two novel aspects to her team’s approach, she says. The first is to analyse five different aspects of the seismic waveform to pick out from the noise exactly when an event occurred.

This information is then fed to a dozen or so mathematical agents that search for the location of the event, such as the initial rockfall leading to a landslide. They do this by estimating what waveform would have been produced if the event had happened in a particular spot and comparing it to the recorded waveform. If it doesn’t match, they try a different spot.

Each agent “moves” in a pattern inspired by the behaviour of animals, from the spiralling of a falcon to the long migrations of elephants, until they have collectively homed in on the most likely location of the event. The entire process takes only around 10 seconds and is much more accurate than previous approaches. “We have basically an order of magnitude [of] improvement,” Ursica says.

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In addition to helping rescue efforts, it will help researchers locate events in remote areas where satellite data is unclear or unavailable, she says: “We can pinpoint events that we otherwise couldn’t see.”

The team plans to publish the details soon and make the code available for others’ use.

When it comes to natural disasters, most are impossible to predict more than a few months or even days ahead of time – you can’t say “an earthquake is going to hit in two years, let’s prepare”. However, one of the few for which we can be truly ready is an asteroid strike.

While nobody has found any large asteroids on a collision course with Earth yet, scientists, engineers and policy-makers are working on planetary defence plans for when we do. Disaster-averting techniques are already being tested, like giving asteroids a bump to change their trajectory, as NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission did successfully in 2022.

One surprisingly useful tool in the planetary defence tool belt is running role-playing games, which can reveal the stumbling blocks that could scupper even the best laid plans. Paul Chodas at NASA, who runs some of these exercises, says they uncover problems we never would have thought of otherwise. In our feature, , you can try such a game for yourself.

Compared with other existential threats, the risks from an asteroid are relatively small

It should come as no surprise that factors like an incoming space rock’s size and how early we spot it play a big role in whether we will successfully avoid disaster, but so too does our ability to collaborate on a global scale and effectively communicate the risks of different options. These are important lessons that go beyond just defending ourselves against asteroids.

Compared with other existential threats, the risks from an asteroid heading our way are relatively small. Climate change is already happening. Pandemics have occurred regularly throughout human history – and are made more likely by our warming planet. We know these come with technical challenges, like the development and rollout of green technologies, but the social ones are just as important.

It is only with effective global collaboration and communication that humanity can tackle its biggest problems. That is just as true in an asteroid role-playing game as it is in reality.

A children’s hospital that lost access to water in the wake of Hurricane Milton is now using a device that can collect drinking water directly from the air, in a test of how such atmospheric water harvesting systems could be used to respond to disasters.

“When a hospital has both water and power you’re good,” says at Genesis Systems, the Florida-based company that designed the apparatus. The system uses absorbent materials called metal organic frameworks to concentrate moisture from air pumped through the machine, then releases pure water when the material is heated by around 8°C.

Such atmospheric water harvesting systems have long attracted interest because of their ability to operate independently of other water infrastructure. A small but growing number are installed to supply daily water to off-grid communities, and they have been used in cities with poor water infrastructure or arid places where water supplies are unreliable, as well as for military operations. An Arizona-based company called Source that makes solar-powered “hydropanels” has even started selling its air water in cans.

Another way these flexible systems have been used is to respond to disasters that leave communities without a reliable clean water supply. As Hurricane Milton approached Florida’s west coast, , the secretary of the Florida Agency for 91ɫ��Ƭ Care Administration, saw an opportunity to try this out.

With Hurricane Ian in 2022, Weida saw how water issues and power outages required some hospitals to close for weeks, with evacuation sometimes required days after the storm itself had passed. He learned about Genesis Systems’ technology while touring damage from Hurricane Helene, which made landfall on 26 September. “I thought, “Wouldn’t this be great for next year’s hurricane season?” he says. “Little did I know that two weeks later we would be preparing for Hurricane Milton.”

Ahead of Milton’s landfall on 9 October, the system was brought to a staging ground for the state’s disaster response. Soon after the hurricane passed, a truck brought it to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg where leaking water mains had interrupted the hospital’s water supply. Weida says this particular hospital was a priority because of how challenging it would be to evacuate newborns from the hospital’s large neonatal intensive care unit.

On 10 October, workers hooked up the shipping-container sized system to a generator, and it is now producing up to 2000 gallons of drinking water per day while the hospital’s regular water supply is being fully restored. Stuckenberg says the system can operate more or less anywhere humidity is above 10 per cent, although it becomes less efficient as humidity declines. He estimates that the system installed in Florida’s humid air uses about 0.8 kilowatt hours of electricity per gallon of water.

at Virginia Tech questions whether the system really can harvest so much water while using so little energy. He says it may still be useful in an emergency scenario, but without more information about how it works, he is sceptical about its claimed efficiency.

Stuckenberg points to a study that he and his colleagues published in 2022, which . He says the system’s energy requirements are so low because of the way the material they use bonds to water vapour with almost no energy, with most energy used to run fans, pumps and to re-concentrate the absorbent. The 2022 study suggested the system has a theoretical maximum efficiency of just 0.07 kilowatt hours per gallon of water.

In a more general sense, atmospheric water harvesting systems can be an “important tool” for disaster response when water supplies might be offline for an extended period of time, says at Arizona State University, and are well-suited for places with relatively high humidity like Florida. However, he says their reliance on electricity, often from a generator, has been an issue during past disasters.