Climate change probably played a part in the glacier and ice collapse that unleashed a devastating flood on the Nepal-Tibet border, a recent study has found. The researchers say the stability of the Himalayan mountains and glaciers is already declining under climate change, while the global water cycle is becoming increasingly erratic.

Dr. Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and one of the study's co-authors, said there was no doubt that human-caused climate change had played a role in creating the preconditions for the disaster. The World Weather Attribution report, published on Thursday, describes the event as a 'compound event' produced by rising temperatures, thinning glaciers, melting snow and a pre-existing geological weakness acting together.

Scientists say the flood began when a mass of rock and glacier ice collapsed near the summit of Langtang Lirung in Nepal's Himalayas. The enormous pile of rock and ice struck the floor of a valley with such force that, according to the United States Geological Survey, the impact registered like a 5.2-magnitude earthquake.

As the findings were released, Nepal's authorities significantly revised the number of people missing in the disaster, from 5,179 to 6,150. Figures published on Wednesday put the death toll at about 1,400. The floods and landslides swept through towns and villages along the border, wiping out thousands of homes, destroying fuel and power infrastructure and leaving thousands dead or missing.

The report does not name climate change as the sole cause. It describes it as a destabilising factor acting on a weakness that was already there. Glaciers in the region had been thinning by about half a metre a year, which can weaken existing fractures and increase the instability of mountain slopes; the study says these processes interact with one another and can make a compound disaster more severe.

For the farming countries downstream of the Himalaya's glacier-fed rivers the message is plain: as warming thins the ice on the mountains, the risk of sudden floods reaching the plains below grows with it. Samakal's desk carried the story citing the BBC.

Source: Samakal