Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods

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By Maxine Joselow and Leo Sands, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet, though scientists are still determining the exact cause of this week’s catastrophe. A group of glaciologists and geologists said on Thursday that the flooding was probably unleashed after an enormous chunk of bedrock collapsed underneath a glacier, triggering a landslide high in the mountains. At the same time, a chunk of ice snapped off the glacier itself and cascaded thousands of feet to the valley below, the scientists said. As humans warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, the Himalayas are losing their permafrost, a mixture of soil, rocks and organic matter that has remained frozen for thousands of years. The thawing permafrost is destabilizing the foundation underneath glaciers, raising the risks of precisely these kinds of landslides and glacial collapses.... 

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