"As glaciers melt and pour massive amounts of water into nearby lakes, 15 million people across the globe live under the threat of a sudden and deadly outburst flood, a new study finds.
More than half of those living in the shadow of the disaster called glacial lake outburst floods are in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China, according to a study in Tuesday’s Nature Communications. A second study, awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal, catalogs more than 150 glacial flood outbursts in history and recent times.
It’s a threat Americans and Europeans rarely think about, but 1 million people live within just 6 miles (10 kilometers) of potentially unstable glacial-fed lakes, the study calculated.
One of the more devastating floods was in Peru in 1941 and it killed between 1,800 and 6,000 people. A 2020 glacial lake outburst flood in British Columbia, Canada, caused a tsunami of water about 330 feet (100 meters) high, but no one was hurt. A 2017 glacial outburst flood in Nepal, triggered by a landslide, was captured on video by German climbers. Alaska’s Mendenhall glacier has had annual small glacial outburst floods in what the National Weather Service calls “suicide basin,” since 2011, according to study lead author Caroline Taylor, a researcher at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom."
Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press February 6, 2023.
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