00:00Mohan Bahadur-Chant is a glaciologist at Kathmandu University in Nepal. Mohan, great to have you on the show.
00:07So, there were concerns about another sudden flood, and what really determines whether a natural dam or lake hoses or
00:14fails?
00:17Yeah, I think for this particular case, there is like a somehow partially jammed glacier lake.
00:24Not a glacier lake, it's just a block by some debris materials, and that's supposed to be increasing in size.
00:33And then we heard that like the lake is like the water is coming out naturally.
00:39And then we can see like the water can release like very slowly, and we expect that there will be
00:46a very small flood,
00:48but it won't have a big impact.
00:51But we have to keep an eye that if there is some like ice break or the glacier break up
00:59from the high up in the Himalayas or mountains,
01:02and then that could again trigger another.
01:04But right now, I think the lake that formed near to the rivers and also the base of the glaciers,
01:12glaciers, I think they are not still, they are in quite a still like nothing significant site that would breach
01:19the does temporary dam
01:21and could lead to a very catastrophic floods.
01:24But we need to keep an eye on those situation.
01:28And the region had a glacial lake related flood just last year.
01:32So, are we seeing a pattern here rather than just isolated disasters?
01:38Yeah, the flood that happened last year was totally different than this particular flood.
01:44As we observed the last year floods that was generated from the supraglacial lakes that formed at the surface of
01:50the glacier.
01:52And then it's a kind of the natural process for those kind of the lakes at the surface of the
01:57glaciers.
01:58And it drained after getting a significant size at the surface of the glaciers, as usually it happens everywhere, like
02:06in many glaciers.
02:07But in that particular case, that supraglacial lake took a huge size, it became a large size.
02:14And when it drained, and then it also contributed the water from the other small ponds surrounding it
02:22and also carried the significant amount of the debris along with it.
02:27And then it caused the like kind of catastrophic flood at that year.
02:31But this is again like totally a different types of flood, which originated from the like just north part of
02:39the Langtang-Lerung peaks.
02:40And then also in 2015, where the another avalanche was triggered by the earthquakes
02:47and the whole Langtang-Lerung was buried under that avalanche.
02:51And this year we've found that just opposite of that avalanche site of 2015,
02:57this glaciers break-up was happened along with some bedrock failure.
03:03And then it caused like significant amount of the energy and carried out lots of debris
03:11and then also the water, sediments, and some ice, ice blocks with it.
03:17And then due to the high energy, it impacted the downstream regions and partially blocked the rivers.
03:23And then it got a time to melt all the glaciers.
03:26And then all those waters outburst it very quickly, suddenly,
03:32and lead it to such a terrible, horrible situation in the downstream region.
03:37Thank you very much for your insight.
03:39That is Mohan Bahandua-Chand, a klesiologist at Kathmandu University.
