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This story originally ran in December, 2025.
Melting ice from the Himalayas is creating thousands of unstable lakes, a growing menace to towns and cities below.
The ice of the Himalayas is wasting away. Glacier-draped slopes are going bare.
The ground atop the mountain range, which sprawls across five
Asian countries, is slumping and sliding as the ice beneath it — ice that held the land together — disappears.
Meltwater is puddling in the valleys below, forming deep lakes.
As humans warm the planet, so much ice has been erased from around Mount Everest that the elevation at base camp in Nepal, which sits on a melting glacier, has dropped more than 67m since the 1980s.
Often it begins slowly, imperceptibly — and then it happens all at once, with catastrophic consequences for the people below. That was how it went on a warm August day in 2024.
Thame, a secluded village of 370 people, sits in a valley in the Everest region. Glacial melt had been pooling rapidly in a high spot above the village for more than a decade. The resulting lake was so remote that nobody had given it a name.
On August 16, 2024, rocks from the surrounding mountains fell hundreds of metres into this lake, displacing an enormous amount of water.
The water rushed down the valley and into another lake, heaving up more water. Soon, 100 million gallons (380 million litres) was coursing downhill. Toward the village.
By the time the water raged through, it was as if a swathe of the village had never existed. The medical clinic, gone. The school, destroyed. Two dozen homes and trekking lodges, plus fields of potatoes — wiped out.
Months later, a scientist named Scott Watson was walking the flood’s path in reverse, up the steep valleys, up past mud-encrusted books in the ruined school, up to the unknown lake that had suddenly made itself very known.
All across the fast-warming Himalayas, melting glaciers are creating thousands of high-altitude lakes — and, in effect, thousands of new opportunities for avalanches and earthquakes to cause destruction.
When falling rocks or snow land on a frozen glacier, nothing much happens. But as the ice melts and forms a lake, those falling objects can set off a flood that menaces villages, tourist lodges, hydropower plants and anything else in its path.
