Anthropogenic climate change caused a glacier to melt, triggering the flooding in Nepal, said scientists and journalists immediately following the disaster. “Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet,” the New York Times reported on August 27 under the headline “Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods.” Explained the Times, “As humans warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, the Himalayas are losing their permafrost” and “the thawing permafrost is destabilizing the foundation underneath glaciers, raising the risks of precisely these kinds of landslides and glacial collapses.” It quoted Ashim Sattar of the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar: “There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.” Alton Byers of the University of Colorado told the Times, “Permafrost has been the cryospheric glue that’s held the rock and the ice and the glaciers together for millennia, and now we’re getting increasing evidence that it’s being weakened by warming trends.” Three days later the Times told readers that “one thing seems certain: The risk of such events is increasing.”
But new satellite imagery reveals that the bedrock beneath the glacier collapsed, bringing the glacier down on top of it. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it,” said geomorphologist Dan Shugar. His colleague Kristen Cook described it as “a collapse of a large piece of bedrock that was sitting below the glacier. The ground underneath the glacier collapsed and took the glacier with it.” Another glaciologist, Jakob Steiner, agreed, explaining that “You basically had the lower part of a glacier tongue that sheared off because the rock below failed.” Cook told the New York Times that “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” and yet the Times headline is “Landslide Along With Glacial Collapse Likely Set Off Nepal Flooding, Scientists Say,” which is misleading in that it was the landslide that brought down the glacier. “Essentially, a chunk of the mountainside collapsed,” Shugar told the Times.