Glaciers, Glacier Lakes and Outburst Floods
In the Himalayas, glaciers are melting and retreating, which produces lakes insecurely dammed by ice or moraines. These dams are at risk of breaking, causing a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) with flows as great as 10,000 cubic metres a second.
In the past two decades GLOF has become a topic of intense discussion within the development community in Nepal. The Dig Tsho GLOF on 4 August 1985, completely destroyed the nearly completed Namche hydropower plant and all bridges, trails, cultivation fields, houses and livestock along its path to the confluence of the Dudh-Koshi and the Sun-Koshi rivers over 90 km (56 mi). The Dig Tsho glacier is on the terminus of the Langmoche Glacier. This event brought into focus the seriousness of such events and the studies to assess the glaciers, glacier lakes and GLOF followed.
Studies of the glaciers and glacier lakes were carried out in 1988 by a joint Sino-Nepalese team. The Arun-Koshi river basin hosts 737 glaciers and 229 glacier lakes, out of which 24 lakes are potentially dangerous. The Sun-Koshi basin is home to 45 glacier lakes, of which 10 are potentially dangerous. According to a Sino-Nepalese study, since the 1940s on at least 10 occasions, glacier lakes burst their dams. Among them were five bursts in three glacier lakes in the Arun River Basin and four in three glacier lakes of the Sun Koshi River Basin.
Read more about this topic: Saptakoshi River
Famous quotes containing the words glacier, lakes, outburst and/or floods:
““The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell-and great was its fall!”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 7:26-27.
Jesus.