A new study reveals that as ice melts and large amounts of water flow into nearby lakes, more than 15 million people around the world are at risk of a deadly flash flood.
A study published in the journal Nature Communications found that more than half of those living through the catastrophe it calls glacial lake outburst floods are concentrated in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China, reports Al-Rai daily.
A second study found that there were more than 150 glacial eruptions that occurred throughout history and modern times. The second study concluded that it is a threat that Americans and Europeans rarely think about, but that a million people live only 10 kilometers from potentially unstable glacial lakes.
One of the most devastating floods occurred in Peru in 1941 and killed between 1,800 and 6,000 people. A 2020 glacial lake flood in British Columbia, Canada, caused a tsunami of water about 100 meters high, but no one was hurt.
German climbers captured an icefall in Nepal in 2017 caused by a landslide.
The Mendenhall glacier in Alaska has also seen small glacial outbursts annually, in what the National Weather Service describes as a “suicide trough” since 2011, according to a study led by Caroline Taylor, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom.
Heavy rains and glacial lake outbursts combined in 2013 in India killed thousands of people.
So far, scientists say, it doesn’t seem like climate change has made these floods more frequent, but that as glaciers shrink due to warming, so does the amount of water in lakes, making them more dangerous in those rare instances of dam bursts.
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