NEW DELHI – When Ravi Chopra saw the devastating flood of water and debris fall downstream from a Himalayan glacier on Sunday, his first thought was that this was exactly the scenario that his team had warned the Indian government in 2014.
At least 31 people have died, 165 people are missing and many are feared to have died. The flood broke first in a small dam, gathering more energy as it got heavier with 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 have been tasked by the Supreme Court of India to study the impact of glacier retreat on dams. They had warned that warming due to climate change was melting Himalayan glaciers and facilitating avalanches and landslides and that building dams in the fragile ecosystem was dangerous.
“They were clearly warned, but they moved on,” said Chopra, director of the non-profit People’s Institute of Science.
Scientists initially suspected that a glacial lake had burst on Sunday. After examining the satellite images, they now believe that a landslide and an avalanche were the most likely causes of the disaster. It is not clear whether the landslide induced an avalanche of ice and debris or whether the ice fall resulted in the landslide, said Mohammad Farooq Azam, who studies glaciers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.
What is known is that a mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow collapsed on a 2 km vertical mountain slope on Sunday. And now scientists are trying to find out if the heat produced by the friction would be enough to melt snow and ice and result in water flooding, he said.
Experts say the disaster underscores the fragility of the Himalayan mountains, 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 one-third of the Himalayan glaciers by the end of the century, a 2019 report from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development concluded. Himalayan glaciers are melting twice as fast since 2000 than in the previous 25 years due to man-made climate change, researchers reported in Science Advances in 2019.
It is not known whether this particular disaster was caused by climate change. But climate change can increase landslides and avalanches. As the glaciers melt due to warming, valleys that were once full of ice open up, creating space for landslides. Elsewhere, steep mountain slopes can be partially “glued” together by ice frozen firmly within their crevices.
“As the warming occurs and the ice melts, the pieces can move downhill more easily, lubricated by water,” explained Richard B. Alley, professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University.
With warming, ice is also essentially becoming less frozen: earlier, its temperature would range from minus 6 degrees Celsius to minus 20 C and is now minus 2 C (from 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 4 F before to 28, 4 F now), said Azam. The ice is still frozen, but it is closer to the melting point, so it takes less heat to trigger an avalanche than a few decades ago, Azam added.
Another threat is the explosion of a glacial lake – what some 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 in the 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 hydroelectric projects, said Schaefer. But it is dangerous to install power plants without looking up and mitigate the risk by diverting water from lakes to control levels, he said.
“The brute strength of these things is just incredible,” especially if they break, he said. “You can’t tame that tiger. You have to avoid this. “
The Uttarakhand state government has said it continually faces “severe energy shortages” and has been forced to spend $ 137 million each year to buy electricity, documents presented to the Indian Supreme Court show. The state has the second highest hydroelectric power generation potential in India, but experts say that solar and wind power offer more sustainable and less risky alternatives in the long run.
Development was necessary to elevate the impoverished region, but experts said such projects should take into account the ecological fragility of the mountains and the unpredictable risks posed by climate change.
For example, during the 2009 construction of the second dam that was hit by the flood on Sunday, workers accidentally drilled an aquifer. Sufficient water for 2 million to 3 million people to drink was drained at a rate of up to 70 million liters (18.5 million gallons) every day for a month and villages in the area faced water shortages.
Development plans must “go along with the environment” and not against it, said Anjal Prakash, a professor at the Indian School of Business who has contributed to researching the impacts of climate change in the Himalayas for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate change is here and now. It is not something that will happen later, ”he said.