Catastrophic Glacier Collapse Won't Be the Last

One reason authorities in Nepal were caught so off guard by this week's devastating floods and landslides: The skies were clear beforehand. "There was no rain in Nepal, so we were not expecting anything like this," explains Narendra Pariyar, chief district officer of Rasuwa, to the New York Times. As it turns out, geologists say the culprit was the collapse of an enormous piece of ice from a high-altitude glacier that turned into a torrent of rock, ice, and water and pulverized a river valley below. In a Washington Post analysis, Sarah Kaplan writes that scenes like this are going to show up more often.

Kaplan's reporting zooms out from this single disaster to the trend: As rising temperatures thaw permafrost and accelerate melt, mountain glaciers are becoming more unstable and harder to predict. Recent collapses in Switzerland, Italy, and India suggest a growing global hazard, especially in the Himalayas, where warming is happening nearly twice as fast as the global average. In this week's example, before-and-after satellite images show that the glacier near the Nepal-China border shrank by about 2 million square feet because of the collapse. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 360 people were dead and more than 1,400 missing, per the AP.