In the future, don't go close to mountains during monsoon season - late May to August end; that period is specifically for Southeast Asia. For the rest of the world, you can find it out.

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totetsu 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This was a glacier collapse. https://www.zhihu.com/question/2075969425702741132/answer/20...

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bamboozled 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I read this wasn't due to rain but a glacial collapse. It sounds to me like the additional advice would be that due to a warming climate, avoid being under a glacier at all costs?

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defrost 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Down stream of a glacier, in the run off water shed.

As I've heard tell, this was a glacial collapse into and blocking a river, which then built up a head of pressure behind it, bursting to release a hammer blow of river water and debris that travelled a great distance.

Similar things can happen due to landslides into rivers; it depends on the topology of the land, here long narrow valleys carved out by heavy water flows.

The warning being, don't live in a natural "drainpipe".

In mountainous regions that's often not much of an option, there's a lot of vertical sides and valley bottoms.

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jltsiren 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The rivers in that area are pretty small. You would have to block them for days before there is a risk of a massive flash flood.

From what I've understood, the collapsing glacier either contained enough liquid water or melted enough from the impact that it continued flowing downstream. It covered ~20 horizontal kilometers in about 7 minutes before hitting the border crossing.

	▲	defrost 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a few ways this could go and very likely no video feed to be sure. It had the look of a large volume of water quickly released. Massive tonnages breaking off of a glacier is still going to be mostly ice on impact .. there's a chance debris and ice chunks made a temporary dam as the bulk of the now shattered glacier ice released water putting pressure on that weak dam - leading to collapse and release.

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bamboozled 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It sounds like there may have been some opportunity for warning then? If the thing was more of a "build up" ?

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defrost 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, if every part of rugged terrain were monitored with sufficient frequency to detect such a change.

That might take some infrastructure to cover everywhere such things can happen (eg: the beds of rivers in Western Australia's Pilbara and Kimberley regions have a high flash flooding risk in the wet season.

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bamboozled 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds like a great application for drone tech.

	▲	defrost 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is it? What's the land area you'd like seamlessly and continuously monitored by a mobile object with moving parts ... and how is that a better solution than using static solar powered instrumentation?