NEW DELHI – When Ravi Chopra saw the devastating avalanche of water and debris crashing downstream from 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 been killed, 165 are missing and many are feared. The flood first burst into a small pond and gathered more energy as it became heavier from the debris it had collected along the way. After that, it broke into a larger pond under construction and gathered even more energy.
Chopra and other experts have been instructed by the Supreme Court of India to study the impact of retreating glaciers on dams. They warned that warming due to climate change would melt the Himalayan glaciers and make avalanches and landslides possible, and that building dams in the fragile ecosystem was dangerous.
“They were clearly warned and yet they continued,” said Chopra, director of the People’s Science Institute, nonprofit.
Scientists have first suspected that an iceberg burst on Sunday. After examining satellite imagery, they now believe that a landslide and avalanche were the most likely causes of the disaster. Mohammad Farooq Azam, who studies glaciers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore, said it was not clear whether the landslide caused an avalanche of ice and debris, and whether the fall of ice caused the landslide.
What is known is that the mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow fell on Sunday against a vertical mountain slope of 2 kilometers (1.2 kilometers). And now scientists are trying to figure out if the heat produced by friction would be enough to melt the snow and ice to cause the flood of water.
Experts believe the disaster underscores the fragility of the Himalayan mountains where the lives of millions are changing through climate change.
Even if the world achieves its most ambitious climate goals, rising temperatures will melt away a third of the Himalayan glaciers by the end of the century, a report by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development in 2019 found. Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since 2000 as in the previous 25 years due to human-caused climate change, researchers reported in 2019.
Whether this particular disaster was caused by climate change is not known. But climate change could increase landslides and avalanches. As glaciers melt due to warming, valleys that used to be clogged with ice open up and create room for landslides to move into. Elsewhere, steep mountain slopes can be partially “glued” together by ice frozen deep in the crevices.
“As warming occurs and the ice melts, the pieces can move more easily downhill, smeared through the water,” explained Richard B. Alley, a professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University.
With the warming, ice also becomes essentially less frozen: earlier the temperature would fluctuate between minus 6 degrees Celsius to minus 20 C and it is now minus 2 C (from 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 4 F earlier to 28.4 F now ), said Azam. The ice is still frozen but is closer to the melting point, and it takes less heat to cause an avalanche than a decade ago, Azam added.
Another threat is that an ice cream is bursting, which for the first time suspected it was 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 Himalayan glaciers at Columbia University.
The water that the lakes release into rivers contains the energy equivalent to ‘several nuclear bombs’ and can provide clean, carbon-free energy through hydropower projects, Schaefer said. But it is dangerous to set up power plants without looking uphill and reduce the risk by sifting water from the lakes to control the levels, he said.
“The brute force of these things just really likes to blow,” especially when it breaks, he said. “You can not tame that tiger. You need to prevent it. ”
The Uttarakhand state government said it was constantly facing an ‘acute shortage of power’ and had to spend $ 137 million annually to buy electricity, according to documents submitted to India’s Supreme Court. The state has the second highest potential for hydropower generation in India, but experts believe that solar energy and wind energy offer more sustainable and less risky alternatives in the long run.
Development was needed to eradicate 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 construction of the second dam that was hit by the floodwaters on Sunday in 2009, workers accidentally stabbed an aquifer. Enough water for 2 million to 3 million people to drink, is drained to 70 million liters (18.5 million liters) per day for a month, and the towns in the area had water shortages.
Development plans should ‘go with the environment’ and not against it, says Anjal Prakash, a professor at the Indian School of Business, who contributed to the study of the effects of climate change in the Himalayas for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
‘Climate change is here and now. “This is not something that will happen later,” he said.