Entertainment
Nepal: Climatologist warns of possibility of future landslides
An update on the natural disaster that occurred on the border with Tibet, and the warning climatologist Cat Berro of the Italian Meteorological Society: “Globally, there is a greater likelihood of large-scale landslides occurring, which may affect glaciers. The retreat of glaciers and the thawing of permafrost are leading to a general destabilisation of high-mountain regions.”
By Davide Dionisi
The Himalayan mountain range is highly prone to instability linked to the presence of glaciers, and this has always been a cause for great concern – and even more so in recent years marked by climate change, accelerated global warming, and glacial retreat. So much so that in 2025, to mark the International Year of Glacier Conservation, the United Nations strengthened the early warning system for this category of phenomena, which are often varied and multifaceted in nature.
A snowballing chain reaction
“In the case of yesterday’s catastrophic event in Nepal, there is still no definitive and clear account of what happened. But the sequence of events is beginning to emerge and researchers are largely in agreement that it was a massive landslide which came crashing down from a mountain onto a glacier, swept over it, caused the glacier to collapse in turn,” said Daniele Cat Berro, a climatologist, journalist, and science communicator with the Italian Meteorological Society.
“This triggered a massive mixture of water, shattered rocks, various sediments, mud, and debris which, as it moved down the valley, clearly grew in size,” he added.
He explained that “some of this water may have come from the very rapid, almost instantaneous melting of enormous volumes of ice swept up by the landslide. Some of the water may also have come from water present in the sediments: the Himalayan region has been experiencing the summer monsoon in recent months, which originates in the Indian Ocean and brings significant rainfall. There was no rainfall yesterday, but the rock masses and sediments may have been saturated with water from previous rainfall. This is still a preliminary reconstruction, which will need to be refined, confirmed and studied further.”
Among the most vulnerable areas in the world
Nepal and Tibet are among the most vulnerable areas in the world to these phenomena. When asked whether adequate early-warning systems exist and what is lacking, Cat Berro replied: “Early-warning systems are beginning to take hold, but they are still clearly insufficient in a territory that is, on the one hand, so vulnerable and, on the other, so complex.”
“Just think,” he continued, “of the extent of the Himalayas (and let’s include the Karakoram to the west as well), with mountains reaching 7,000–8,000 metres, over 8,000 metres, hundreds of valleys and thousands of glaciers. It is essentially impossible to envisage monitoring them all adequately.”
He pointed out that “satellites certainly provide a great deal of help today, but there is still a long way to go in expanding and enhancing early warning systems for the population. This must be a key objective for the coming years, and it is also being pursued by the World Meteorological Organisation in general for all kinds of extreme weather events affecting the world, and in particular mountainous areas.”
The risk of similar events
Asked if we should expect events such as the one in Nepal to become more frequent in the coming years and decades, the climatologist responded, “Potentially, yes.” He explained, “First and foremost because the thawing of high-altitude permafrost – the substrate that is perpetually or almost perpetually frozen at depth – gradually destabilises rock masses as it thaws. There is therefore, generally speaking, a greater likelihood worldwide – and in the Alps too – of landslides occurring, including large-scale ones, which can sometimes affect and involve glaciers. The retreat of glaciers and the thawing of permafrost thus lead to a general destabilisation of high-mountain areas.”
From Asia to the rest of the world
Referring specifically to the incidents that have occurred in the Alps, Cat Berro notes:
“We have also had cases of the same kind in the Alps, fortunately with very different consequences from those seen yesterday in Nepal. The case of Blatten springs to mind: the catastrophic rock and ice avalanche that, on 28 May 2025, completely buried the Swiss village. Whilst the dynamics and scale were different, we can say that it was a fairly similar event. The difference lies in the fact that in Switzerland that mountain had been monitored for several years, and this monitoring enabled an early warning to be issued to the population, who were fully evacuated two weeks in advance. There was just one fatality, compared with the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, yesterday in Nepal.”
“The other event,” concludes the researcher from the Italian Meteorological Society, “also in Switzerland, dates back to 2017: the massive collapse of the north face of Pizzo Cengalo, which in that case too swept over the glacier below, triggering a huge debris flow down onto the village of Bondo at the bottom of the valley, resulting in the disappearance of eight hikers who are still missing along the trails. Another event of the same category.”
Source link
