NEW DELHI – When Ravi Chopra saw a devastating flood of water and debris on Sunday, downstream of a Himalayan glacier, 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 people are missing and many fear they have died. 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 warming due to climate change was melting the Himalayan glacier and facilitating avalanches and landslides, and that the construction of dams in the fragile ecosystem was dangerous.
“They were clearly warned and yet they went ahead,” said Chopra, director of the nonprofit People’s Science Institute.
Scientists had first suspected that a glacial lake had erupted on Sunday. After examining the satellite images, they now believe that landslides and avalanches were the most likely causes of the disaster. It is unclear whether the landslide induced an avalanche of ice and debris or whether the fall of the ice led to the landslide, said Mohammad Farooq Azam, who studies glaciers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.
What is known is that the mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow collapsed on Sunday for a 2 kilometer (1.2 mile) nearby. And now scientists are trying to figure out if the heat produced by the friction would be enough to melt snow and ice to lead to water 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 meets its most ambitious climate change goals, rising temperatures will melt a third of the Himalayan glaciers by the end of the century, a 2019 report by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development found. Himalayan glaciers are melting twice as fast since 2000 as in the past 25 years due to man-made climate change, researchers in Science Advances reported in 2019.
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 occurs 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 is the explosion of a glacial lake – which some first suspected was the cause of Sunday’s disaster. The danger posed by these expanding lakes cannot be ignored, said Joerg Michael Schaefer, a climate scientist specializing in ice and especially the Himalayan glaciers at Columbia University.
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 it is dangerous to set up power plants without looking up and mitigating the risk by siphoning water from lakes to control levels, 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.
Development was necessary to raise the poor region, but experts said such projects should take into account the ecological fragility of 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. Enough water to drink from 2 million to 3 million people, consumed every day for a month, at a rate of up to 70 million liters (18.5 million gallons), and the villages in the area s -they faced water shortages.
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.