Climate crisis kills 160 in Nepal

KATHMANDU, Nepal — The water came not from the sky but from the mountains, and it came with the force of a judgment long delayed.

By the time the roiling wall of ice, rock and mud had finished its work along the Nepal-Tibet border, at least 160 people were dead and more than 680 remained missing Wednesday, swallowed by a flood that scientists say was born of a warming world.

The disaster struck around 9 a.m. in the Rasuwa region north of Kathmandu when a glacial collapse sent a torrent of debris surging down the Lhende and Bhotekoshi rivers.

The U.S. Geological Survey initially registered the event as a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, then revised its assessment: what shook the earth was not a quake but a landslide measuring 5.2 in force, the seismic signature of a mountain coming apart.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development reported that an avalanche of ice and rock poured into the river, and investigators are examining whether landslide debris temporarily dammed the narrow gorge before giving way in a catastrophic secondary surge.

“It is now clearer than ever that the frequency of cryosphere-related disasters is increasing due to climate change,” said Mohammad Farooq Azam, a senior specialist at the center.

Nepalese police have recovered 157 bodies, while Chinese state media reported three additional deaths in Tibet’s Gyirong county.

The missing include 341 foreign nationals — among them 133 Indian pilgrims bound for Mount Kailash, 47 Americans, 34 Australians, 33 Britons and 24 Canadians.Nine South Korean workers building a hydropower plant in Rasuwa are unaccounted for, along with 28 Nepalese police officers and 44 army personnel.

What the numbers cannot convey is the nature of the thing itself. Drone footage showed roads erased, buildings buried to their second stories in mud, vehicles tossed like toys and the stunned survivors standing caked in gray silt, staring at where their homes used to be.

At least 19 bridges were swept away, 40 kilometers of road destroyed and 13 hydropower projects damaged or erased entirely.“Due to the flood, a large number of hydropower projects, government offices and road facilities were erased,” Foreign Minister Sishir Khanal told parliament.

The Himalayan region has always been a place of violent beauty, where rivers cut deep and mountains shed their weight in rock and ice.

But what the glaciers are doing now is not the slow work of ages. It is the accelerated unraveling of a system pushed past its breaking point by rising temperatures.

Ahn Jin-ho, a professor at Seoul National University, said the fundamental cause is the rapid melting of glaciers and snowpack driven by global warming.With continued warming, he warned, large-scale climate disasters of this kind are expected to occur more frequently.

What makes this calamity a crime as much as a tragedy is that it was not unforeseen. In July 2025, a similar flood originating in Tibet struck a neighboring river. Nepalese officials said at the time they had received no advance warning from China and that no system existed to share such information.A year later, the same failure repeated itself with far deadlier results.

Rescue teams from Nepal’s army, police and armed police forces have been deployed with helicopters, drones and rafts.India has pledged humanitarian assistance. The United States, the European Union and others have offered support.But the geography of the region — high mountains, deep valleys and rain forecast for the next three days — has made reaching the stricken areas a desperate struggle.

One woman told the BBC that her family was swept away in front of her. She and her son survived by climbing to a rooftop.A trekking guide who left his village an hour before the flood arrived said his house had collapsed and his sister was missing.

The people of Nepal did not ask for this. They did not build the dams that hold back the meltwater or burn the fuels that warm the planet. They simply live in the shadow of mountains that are now, in a very real sense, falling down around them. And the world, which has spent decades debating whether the climate is changing while the ice melts and the waters rise, has finally delivered its answer in the form of a wall of mud that leaves 160 dead and hundreds more gone.

The question now is not whether more such floods will come. It is whether anyone will be listening when they do.