Nepal-Tibet flash flood: Disaster sparks climate fears as search continues for 1300 missing

Mud-covered ruins, destroyed homes and heartbroken survivors paint a grim picture of the devastation left behind by Nepal’s catastrophic floods, as experts work to determine what caused the disaster.

Thirty-four Australians are missing and more than 350 bodies have been found along the Himalayan border after a wall of mud and rock collapsed into a river on Wednesday.

Rescue efforts to find hundreds more missing are ongoing to minimise loss of life and find those cut off from friends and family.

For one survivor, Janak Bahadur it was a tale of disaster when a glacier high in the Himalaya rumbled loose sending a torrent of ice roaring down the mountain.

At one stage it registered as an earthquake, but it was a tsunami of water, ice and debris. It became clogged in waterways before the wall of terror burst through narrow valleys.

The mountains either side were so steep which created a flood of terrifying force rocketing into villages and homes along the river which reached levels higher than nine metres within 30 minutes.

“It (floods) came in suddenly and exploded like a bomb,” Janak Bahadur told Reuters.

“The river looked small from distance but it suddenly started overflowing and swept through this place.”

“We are facing a lot of challenges and the biggest one being blocked roads… as of now, we are not able to tell how many people are still stuck or buried under the debris as there is no way to reach the spot,” said another survivor.

Authorities said Friday morning that more than 1300 people are missing, including more than 700 foreigners. The latest body count was 359 with experts warning the death toll will likely continue rising.

Experts are now trying to understand the “ice avalanche” that has caused such widespread destruction and devastation.

University of Auckland Associate Professor in River Science Jon Tunnicliffe explained the event was a “hazard cascade” where instability high on a glacierised slope becomes an ice–rock avalanche, it then can block a river, entrain water and sediment, and transform into a debris-laden flood travelling tens of kilometres downstream.

“There is an important climate-change context here, but we need to be careful about attribution. We do not yet know why this particular glacier failed,” Tunnicliffe said.

“What we do know is that conditions across the Hindu Kush Himalaya are changing rapidly.