The Himalayas’ Tears Have Sent a 20-Year Warning

A vast lake hidden high in Nepal’s Himalayas carries a danger far greater than its beauty. Tsho Rolpa, in the Rolwaling Valley, sits at an altitude of 4,500 meters, where melting glaciers are steadily swelling its waters.

The lake covered just 0.23 square kilometers in 1957. More than five decades later, its area had grown to 1.65 square kilometers. It now stretches 3.2 kilometers, reaches a depth of 131 meters and holds about 100 million cubic meters of water.

Its barrier is made of gravel and soil. If that dam gives way, more than 6,000 people living downstream could face what the report calls a “water bomb.” Floods caused by the collapse of a glacial dam are known as a “vertical tsunami.”

A Dong-A Ilbo reporter who accompanied a Himalayan paragliding expedition in December 2011 saw the disaster risk concealed behind the mountain range’s grandeur. The report warned that a collapse could turn 100 kilometers downstream into a sea of tears. Earlier, in December 2006, the newspaper had described the threat from collapsing Himalayan glacial lakes as a “tsunami sweeping in from the sky.”