NEW DELHI – When Ravi Chopra saw the devastating deluge of water and debris falling down a Himalayan glacier on Sunday, his first thought was that this was exactly the scenario whose team had warned of Indian government in 2014.
At least 31 people have died, 165 people are missing and many fear they have died. The flood first crashed into a small dam, accumulating more energy as it became heavier than the debris it was collecting along the way. It then became a larger dam and under construction and accumulated even more energy.
Chopra and other experts had been commissioned by the Supreme Court of India to study the impact of retreating glaciers on dams. They had warned that warming due to climate change was melting the Himalayan glaciers and facilitated 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 non-profit People’s Institute of Science.
Scientists first suspected a glacial lake had erupted on Sunday. After examining satellite images, they now believe the landslide and avalanche were the most likely causes of the disaster. It is unclear whether the landslide induced an avalanche of ice and debris, or whether the ice fall caused 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, pebbles, ice and snow fell on a Sunday near the vertical slope of the mountain near the vertical slope of the mountain. And now scientists are trying to find out if the heat produced due to friction would be enough to melt snow and ice to cause water flooding, he said.
Experts say the disaster highlights the fragility of the Himalayan mountains, where the lives of millions 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, according to a 2019 report by the International Development Center. Integrated Mountains. Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since 2000 as in the previous 25 years due to human-induced climate change, researchers told 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 glaciers melt due to warming, valleys that were previously crowded with ice open up, creating space for landslides. Elsewhere, steep mountain slopes may be partially “stuck” to each other by the icy ice inside their crevices.
“As warming occurs and ice melts, the pieces can move down more easily, lubricated by water,” explained Richard B. Alley, a professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University. .
With warming, the ice is also essentially less frozen: before its temperature would range from minus 6 degrees Celsius to minus 20 ºC and is now minus 2 ºC (from 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 4 ºF before 28, 4 ºC now), said Azam. The ice is still frozen, but it is closer to its melting point, so less heat is needed to cause an avalanche a few decades ago, Azam added.
Another threat is the eruption 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 glaciers in the Himalayas at Columbia University.
The water the lakes release into rivers contains energy equal to “several nuclear pumps” and can provide clean, carbon-free energy through hydroelectric projects, Schaefer said. But it is dangerous to install power plants without looking up and mitigating the risk of siphoning water from lakes to control levels, he said.
“The brute force of these things is really impressive,” especially if they break, he said. “You can’t tame that tiger. It must be avoided. “
The Uttarakhand state government said it was continually facing a “severe shortage of electricity” and was forced to spend $ 137 million each year to buy electricity, according to documents submitted to the Supreme Court. India. The state has the second highest potential to generate hydropower in India, but experts say solar and wind power offer more sustainable and less risky alternatives in the long run.
Development was necessary for the uplift of the impoverished region, but experts said such projects should 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 suffered flood water on Sunday, workers accidentally drilled an aquifer. There is enough water to drink from 2 to 3 million people to drain at a rate of up to 70 million liters (18.5 million gallons) every day for a month and the villages in the area are in short supply. water.
Development plans should go “together with the environment” and not against it, said Anjal Prakash, a professor at the Indian School of Business who has contributed to research into the impacts of climate change in the Himalayas for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate change is here and now. It’s not something that will happen later, ”he said.