NEW DELHI (AP) – 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 his team had alerted the Indian government to in 2014 .
At least 31 people died, 165 people are missing and it is feared that more 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 temperatures due to climate change were melting Himalayan glaciers and facilitating avalanches and landslides, and that building dams in this fragile ecosystem was dangerous.
“They were clearly warned and yet they moved on,” said Chopra, director of the non-profit People’s Institute of Science.
Scientists initially suspected that a glacial lake had burst, but after examining the satellite images they now believe that a landslide and an avalanche were the most likely cause of the disaster. What is still unclear is 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, however, is that the mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow collapsed for 2 kilometers (1.2 miles), near the vertical slope of the mountain on Sunday. And now scientists are trying to find out if the heat produced during the accident due to 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 met its most ambitious climate change goals, rising temperatures would melt a third of Himalayan glaciers by the end of the century, a 2019 report found by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development. Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since 2000 than in the previous 25 years due to man-made climate change, a 2019 article in Science Advances found.
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 from warming temperatures is the explosion of a glacial lake – what some suspected was the cause of Sunday’s disaster. The danger posed by these expanding lakes becoming more susceptible to breaches cannot be ignored, said Joerg Michael Schaefer, a climate scientist specializing in ice and especially on 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.
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 installing power plants without looking up and mitigating risk by diverting water from lakes to control levels was dangerous, 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 for the elevation of the impoverished region, but experts say that a paradigm shift is necessary for the execution 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 the flood on Sunday, workers accidentally drilled an aquifer. Sufficient water for 2 to 3 million people to drink was drained at a rate of 60 to 70 million liters of water every day for a month and villages in the area faced water shortages, the 2014 report revealed.
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.
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Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland, contributed to this report.
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