00:00A devastating flood in the border area of Nepal and China swept through villages and inundated
00:07buildings. Experts say rising temperatures and melting glaciers probably played a role in the
00:14disaster. But they warned against describing climate change as the sole trigger. Here's what
00:21we know so far about the cause of the floods. Scientists say it probably began with a massive
00:28ice rock avalanche, though the exact cause of the Himalayan disaster is still being analyzed.
00:35Hundreds were killed, with over a thousand still missing days after the catastrophe.
00:41Mohan Bahadur-Chand, an assistant professor at Kathmandu University's Department of Environmental
00:47Science explains. The height where we are assuming that ice was broken is about 5200 meters from the
00:57sea level. And then the vertical drop of almost 1200 meters. And then again, the ice might have melted
01:06during that drop. Chant said the combination of extreme height and speed was enough to melt the
01:13broken ice and drag vast quantities of debris down with it. It carried several amounts of tons of
01:22sediment in that low parts. And then again, there was another vertical drops all the way to the rivers,
01:30which was about 3000 meters. Similar catastrophic surges have hit the region in recent years,
01:38but on a smaller scale. These events have occurred throughout history. What's unusual is the scale of
01:45this landslide? It is incredibly large. Benjamin Horton is dean of the School of Energy and Environment
01:52at the City University of Hong Kong. With climate change, that summer melting is more extensive,
01:59it's more intensive, it lasts for a longer period of the year. So the probability of these landslides
02:07that are generated by climate change is increasing year upon year. The long-term trend appears stark.
02:16The United Nations said in 2023 that global warming caused Nepal's snow-capped mountains to lose around
02:23one-third of their ice cover in just over 30 years. And glaciers in Nepal had melted 65 percent
02:31faster over the previous decade than they had in the decade before. One of the things that I find so
02:38tragic is that the people who lost their lives and lost their livelihoods didn't contribute to this
02:45problem. They're not the polluters of carbon dioxide. We know who are the polluters and they are responsible.
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