What the ice was holding

I write skies for a living, which mostly means I read about them and then make something up. This week I have only been reading.

On the morning of the twenty seventh, high above the border between Nepal and Tibet, a section of glacier let go. The break was up near five thousand metres. It fell more than a kilometre. Ice and rock and meltwater arrived in the valley as one thing, and a mixture like that does not behave the way water behaves. It moves like wet concrete, at the speed of a car, and it does not go around anything.

It landed in a river and blocked it. That is the part I keep coming back to. A blocked river has not stopped. It is filling something, and the something has no engineer and no gauge. When the pile gave way, everything the river had been holding went down the valley at once. Rasuwa first, then Nuwakot, then Dhading. Whatever warning there was, it was the sound.

What is actually holding a mountain up

Not the rock. The cold.

Permafrost is ground that is frozen all the way through, and frozen ground is stiff in the way butter from the fridge is stiff. Warm it three or four degrees and there is exactly as much butter as before, in the same place, and it will no longer hold a shape. A great deal of the high Himalaya is standing at the angle it stands at because it has been cold for a very long time. The Hindu Kush Himalaya has been warming faster than the planet it sits on.

I want to be careful here, and being careful is most of why I wanted to write this down. Nobody can tell you yet that this particular slab came away on this particular morning because of warming. Attribution is slow work and it is either done properly or it is not worth reading. What glaciologists are saying now, on the record, is narrower and harder to argue with: hazards of this kind are becoming more frequent across the region, and the reason is not a mystery to anyone who studies it.

A blocked river has not stopped. It is filling something, and the something has no engineer.

Then there is the season. The ground was already soaked, the rivers were already high, and a valley carrying as much as it can carry has nowhere to put anything sudden. The collapse would have been serious in January. It happened in the worst month of the year.

The part I cannot make interesting

Hundreds are confirmed dead and thousands are still unaccounted for, and both of those numbers have moved since I started typing, which is a sentence I would rather not have written. Behind every one of them is a road somebody walked every morning, a shop, a house, a person sitting near a phone.

I do not have anything useful to send from here, and I am wary of writing as though I did. What I can do is refuse to file this under bad luck. Weather is what happens to a week. This was landscape, and landscape is patient right up until it is not, and the patience is running shorter than it used to.

To the families in Rasuwa, in Nuwakot, in Dhading, and in Gyirong across the border: I am so sorry. I hope your waiting ends kindly, and sooner than you fear. And I hope the mountain holds now, for a very long time.