'Human-caused warming helped prime slope for deadly Nepal-Tibet flood'

Human-caused climate change likely helped destabilise rock-and-ice slope whose collapse triggered the Aug 26 Nepal-Tibet disaster, first scientific assessment of the deadly event released Thursday found, linking decades of warming to thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost and more rain replacing snow.“There’s absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster through permafrost thawing, through thinning of the glaciers, through having more rainfall instead of snow,” said Friederike Otto, climatologist at Imperial College London and co-author of World Weather Attribution (WWA) study.Researchers described it as a cascading disaster rather than conventional flood. Around 2 sq km of rock wall and glacier ice collapsed from Langtang Lirung at about 5,150 metres, plunging around 1,400 metres before turning into a debris flood.