NEW DELHI (AP) – When Ravi Chopra saw a devastating flood of water and debris downstream of a Himalayan glacier on Sunday, his first thought was that this was exactly the scenario his team had warned the Indian government in 2014.
At least 31 people have died, 165 are missing, many of whom are feared dead. The flood first shattered into a small dam, gathering more energy as it became heavier from the debris it collected along the way. Then it broke into a larger dam under construction and gathered even more energy.
Chopra and other experts had been tasked by the Supreme Court of India to study the impact of the retreat of glaciers on dams. They had warned that warm temperatures due to climate change were melting the Himalayan glaciers and facilitating avalanches and landslides, and that dam construction in this fragile ecosystem was dangerous.
“They were clearly warned and yet they continued,” said Chopra, director of the nonprofit People’s Institute of Science.
Scientists had first suspected that a glacial lake had erupted, but after examining satellite images, they now believe that the landslide and the avalanche were the most likely cause of the disaster. What is not yet clear is whether the landslide caused an avalanche of ice and debris or whether the falling ice led to the landslide, said Mohammad Farooq Azam, who studies glaciers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.
However, it is known that the mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow collapsed on Sunday on a vertical slope of 2 kilometers (1.2 miles). And now scientists are trying to figure out if the heat produced during this accident due to friction would be enough to melt snow and ice to lead to flooding, he said.
Experts say the disaster underscores the fragility of the Himalayas, where the lives of millions of people are being altered by climate change. Even if the world met its most ambitious climate change targets, rising temperatures would melt a third of the Himalayan glaciers by the end of the century, a 2019 report of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development found. Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since 2000 as in the past 25 years due to man-made climate change, a 2019 article in Science Advances was found.
It is not known whether this particular disaster was caused by climate change. But climate change can increase landslides and avalanches. As glaciers melt due to warming, valleys that were previously crowded with ice open up, creating space for landslides. Elsewhere, the steep mountain slopes can be partially “glued” together by ice frozen tightly in its cracks. “As warming takes place and the ice melts, the pieces can move more easily down, lubricated by water,” said Richard B. Alley, a professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University.
As it warms, the ice also becomes less frozen: earlier its temperature ranged from minus 6 degrees Celsius to minus 20 C and is now minus 2 C (from 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 4 F earlier at 28.4 F now), said Azam. The ice is still frozen, but it is closer to the melting point, so less heat is needed to trigger an avalanche than a few decades ago, Azam added.
Another threat posed by warming temperatures is the explosion of a glacial lake – which some first suspected was the cause of Sunday’s disaster. The danger of these expanding lakes becoming more susceptible to breaches cannot be ignored, said Joerg Michael Schaefer, a climate scientist specializing in ice and especially Himalayan glaciers at Columbia University.
The water that lakes release into rivers contains energy equal to “several nuclear bombs” and can provide clean, carbon-free energy through hydropower projects.
The water that lakes release into rivers contains energy equal to “more than one nuclear bomb” and can provide clean, carbon-free energy through hydropower projects, Schaefer said. But installing power plants without looking up and mitigating the risk by siphoning water from lakes to control levels was dangerous, he said.
“The brute force of these things is just a really mind-blowing mind,” especially if they break, he said. “You can’t tame that tiger. You have to prevent this. “
The Uttarakhand state government has said it continues to face an “acute shortage of energy” and is forced to spend $ 137 million a year to buy electricity, according to documents submitted to India’s Supreme Court. The state has the second largest hydropower potential in India, but experts say solar and wind power offer more sustainable and less risky alternatives in the long run.
The development was necessary to raise the poor region, but experts said that the paradigm shift is needed for the implementation of such projects to take into account the ecological fragility of the mountains and the unpredictable risks of climate change.
For example, during the 2009 construction of the second dam that was hit by flood water on Sunday, workers accidentally drilled an aquifer. Sufficient water for 2-3 million people to drink, drained at a rate of 60-70 million liters of water every day for a month, and the villages in the area have faced water shortages, it is shown in the 2014 report.
Development plans must “go along with the environment” and not against it, said Anjal Prakash, a professor at the Indian Business School, who helped research the impact of climate change in the Himalayas for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate change is here and now. It’s not something that’s going to happen later, “he said.
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Victoria Milko of Jakarta, Indonesia and Seth Borenstein of Kensington, Maryland, contributed to this report.
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