Deadly landslide destroyes villages in Langtang valley in Nepal

Several hours after giving coverage to this on Morning Report Radio NZ has posted something on its website
on the devastating landslide in the  Langtang Valley in Nepal on the border with Tibet, which describes an entire village being destroyed.  No doubt this has been replicated many times.

Of this there is not a sign on Radio NZ's website and I cannot find anything on this from the BBC, so I am providing what I can find.

There has been a lot from international media about Kathmandy and its environs but there has been very little of the fate of these isolated parts of Nepal.

These people who already had very little now have nothing.  It is essential that they receive help and I will be coming back with more on this very soon.

Nepal earthquake 'Worst affected' village of Langtang

BBC

Emergency workers in Nepal continue to face challenges after the devastating earthquake.

Their priority is to reach the country's remote, mountainous villages, feared to have been wiped off the map.

Nepalese village 'wiped out'

Radio NZ,

5 May, 2015

The Nepalese earthquake may have killed more than 300 people in a single village in a popular trekking area.

Nepalis and foreign trekkers were killed in the village of Langtang following the devastating earthquake nine days ago.

A file image of Langtan village, home to 435 people. - Photo: AFP / FILE

The first reporter to reach Langtang in northern Nepal said the village had been razed and bodies were laid out everywhere.

Justin Rowlatt said villagers told him the sky went dark before an avalanche came down.

"You can see the power of the damage that was done, all the trees were knocked down like so many matchsticks."

He said the avalanche collapsed on top of the village and barely any remains of it could be seen.

He said 178 villagers and 150 foreigners may have died in the avalanche.

One survivor, Dindu Lama, told him he had lost family members.

"We have lost everything .... now we have nothing," he said.

Langtan village was one of the most popular trekking destinations in Nepal and home to 435 people.

Fifty-five hotels and guesthouses and the villagers' homes are now buried under a mass of ice and rock.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake is now known to have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 10,000.

Deadly Landslide Triggered by 7.8 Earthquake in Nepal Spotted By Satellite

the Weather Channel,

3 May, 2015

A newly obtained satellite image shows a deadly landslide triggered by the massive 7.8 earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25.

Using Landsat satellite imagery from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), NASA released the comparison below which shows the landslide on April 30 near the village of Langtang. The other image in the animation shows the exact same area about a month prior to the earthquake on March 29.

  (NASA/USGS)

According to NASA, the small village of Langtang is located along a popular trekking route in the area. The landslide developed on the mountain slopes north of the village and wiped out the tiny town as it slid downward towards the Langtang River, NASA says.

The Associated Press said on Sunday morning that the remains of 55 people were found this weekend in the Langtang Valley where the landslide occurred. These are the latest deaths to be included in the overall death toll that is now over 7,200

Nepal earthquake rescue teams search for missing trekkers in Himalayas

100 bodies discovered in remote Langtang region of Nepalese Himalayas as death toll from 25 April disaster reaches 7,365

The Guardian

4 May, 2015

Police, soldiers and volunteers have launched a major search operation in the remote Langtang region of the Nepalese Himalayas to look for up to 600 trekkers and support staff who have been missing since an 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the south Asian country nine days ago.

The death toll in the disaster has reached 7,365, with 14,355 injured. The bodies of about 100 trekkers and villagers were recovered at the biggest village in Langtang, which lies 60km (40 miles) north of Kathmandu and is on a trekking route popular with westerners.

The entire village, which includes 55 guesthouses used by trekkers, was wiped out by the avalanche, officials said. “Volunteers and police personnel are digging through six-foot snow with shovels looking for more bodies,” Gautam Rimal, assistant chief district officer, said.

Uddab Bhattarai, the most senior administrator in the area, said more than 400 people had been killed in Langtang, with at least 250 missing. “We have been doing search and rescue massively but haven’t been able to figure out the exact number of missing,” he said.

The president of Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal, Ramesh Dhamala, said the number of people missing could at least twice as high. “According to the records, 1,350 Nepalese and foreign trekkers entered Langtang, but once the earthquake struck we were unable to find out how many were still there,” he said. “We assume at least 600 foreigners and Nepalese might be missing in the area.”

Langtang, a region of steep gorges and high mountains on the border with Tibet, was hit by massive landslides after the quake. “It seems that entire hillsides sheared away. There were huge avalanches too, a mix of snow and mud,” said a Kathmandu-based trekking operator with long experience of the region.

Tulsi Prasad Gautam, head of the tourism department in Nepal, described the Langtang valley as “completely wiped away”.

In other parts of the Himalayan country, three people were pulled alive from the rubble of their home on Sunday, eight days after the earthquake, while local media reported that a 101-year-old man was found alive on Saturday.

There was continuing confusion over the climbing season on Everest, the world’s highest peak, with conflicting announcements by government officials. Whatever the eventual administrative decision it appears the spring season, which is the most popular with mountaineers, is unlikely to see any attempts on the 29,000ft mountain.

The route that is laid anew each year through the icefall, one of the most dangerous passages though low down the peak, has been largely destroyed and local Sherpa guides who specialise in preparing a path through the jumble of ice blocks and crevasses are reported to have refused to repair it.

The relief operation has been troubled by bureaucratic bottlenecks, logistic difficulties and rough terrain. Aftershocks are also continuing, though bad weather that had grounded helicopters has cleared.

Nine days after the earthquake, Sushil Koirala, the prime minister of Nepal, has made his first visit outside the capital. The 75-year-old politician travelled to Chautara in Sindhupalchowk district, where at least 3,000 people were killed. “We are doing our best in whatever resources we have,” he said, adding that his home had been damaged.

Western aid officials have expressed frustration at infighting within the Nepalese government, which they say is hampering the relief operation.

The chief district officer of Gorkha, Uddhav Timilsina, said 20,000 tarpaulins had been distributed, though more than twice as many were needed. “Landslides in some places have affected our relief distribution and we haven’t been able to reach some of the affected area because of the road conditions,” he said. “We do have scarcity of food.”

A police spokesman, Kamal Singh Bam, said a shortage of tarpaulins was a serious problem.

US military aircraft and personnel arrived in Nepal on Sunday and were due to begin helping ferry relief supplies to stricken areas outside the capital. The US contingent comprised eight aircraft, including one Huey and two C-130s, and 100-120 personnel, spokeswoman Capt Cassandra Gesecki said.

On Sunday, the government restricted the landing of large cargo aircraft at the congested airport to limit damage to the stressed runway. The UN has said 8 million of Nepal’s 28 million people had been affected by the quake, with at least 2 million needing tents, water, food and medicines over the next three months. A survey found that three-quarters of the buildings in Kathmandu had been destroyed or were unsafe.

Thousands of people remain camped out in the city and its surroundings. Many more remote villages are still to be reached, and aid officials fear further fatalities from infected wounds sustained in the quake and among vulnerable sections of the population such as the elderly and the very young.

Here is all the video footage I can find

Amateur video shows landslide and damage after Nepal earthquake

And to see how this amazing part of the world looked before the earthquake

Resilience

The resilience of mountain dwellers of Nepal is extraordinary.

After losing his house to the quake Mr. Dev Narayan Sapkota salvaged what he could and made this new shelter in two days. Hats Off to him for not waiting for any outside support.

Location Gothpani VDC. Kavre.

Mt Everest

"You could say [that] climate change closed Mt. Everest this year,"

The Year Climate Change Closed Everest

As the world heats up, the Himalayas are becoming more volatile.

SVATI KIRSTEN NARULAAPR

the Atlantic

30 April, 2014

The deadly avalanche on Everest earlier this month wasn't technically an avalanche. It was an "ice release"—a collapse of a glacial mass known as a serac. Rather than getting swept up by a rush of powdery snow across a slope, the victims fell under the blunt force of house-sized ice blocks tumbling through the Khumbu Icefall, an unavoidable obstacle on the most popular route up Everest. The worst accident in the mountain's history has effectively ended the 2014 climbing season. And some see global warming as the key culprit.

"We need to learn more about what is going on up there. Each day we sit and listen to the groaning and crashing of the glacier."

"I am at Everest Basecamp right now and things are dire because of climate change," John All, a climber, scientist, and professor of geography at Western Kentucky University, told me by email. "The ice is melting at unprecedented rates and [that] greatly increases the risk to climbers."

"You could say [that] climate change closed Mt. Everest this year," he added.

Climbers had warily eyed the serac that collapsed on April 18 for years. In fact, a major expedition outfitter canceled its climbing season in 2012 because of it—a decision vividly reconstructed by Jon Krakauer in The New Yorker last week:

For many years, the most lucrative commercial guiding operation on Mt. Everest has been a company called Himalayan Experience, or Himex, which is owned by a New Zealand mountaineer named Russell Brice. In the spring of 2012, more than a month into the climbing season, he became increasingly worried about a bulge of glacial ice three hundred yards wide that was frozen tenuously to Everest’s West Shoulder, hanging like a massive sword of Damocles directly over the main route up the Nepal side of the mountain.

Ice frequently falls from this hanging glacier on the West Shoulder, and traversing the Icefall has always been treacherous. "Ice doctors" who install ladders and ropes in the area have long adjusted and readjusted the infrastructure in response to the collapses, big and small, that occur there on a daily basis. But experts believe these dangers are multiplying as average temperatures rise. In Krakauer's words, "the pronounced warming of the Himalayan climate in recent years has made the Icefall more unstable than ever, and there is still no way to predict when a serac is going to topple over."

Between increased climber traffic, the sun's rays, and slow-but-sure glacial movement, the Khumbu Icefall has taken a beating in recent years. (Tim Rippel/Facebook)

Or take it from Tim Rippel, who runs Peak Freaks and was blogging from Base Camp last week:

As a professional member of the Canadian Avalanche Association I have my educated concerns. The mountain has been deteriorating rapidly the past three years due [to] global warming and the breakdown in the Khumbu ice-fall is dramatic, especially at the upper icefall. We need to learn more about what is going on up there. Each day we sit and listen to the groaning and crashing of the glacier.

The Icefall is a formation of the Khumbu glacier, which stretches between Everest and a neighboring peak called Lhotse. And, like others around the globe, this glacier is melting. (A caveat: Glaciers in the nearby Karakoram region, home to the towering K2, appear to be growing, according to the latest research.) The Khumbu glacier shifts by a few feet each day and has shrunk by more than half a mile in length (from 12,040 meters to 11,097 meters) over the past 50 years—though it's by no means the fastest-retreating glacier in the region. Base Camp, which sits on the glacier below the Icefall, has lost about 40 feet in elevation over the same time period, according to the glaciologist Mauri Pelto.

"If it wasn't the tallest mountain in the world, you would never put yourself on a glacier this active," veteran guide Adrian Ballinger recently told the Associated Press.

The Himalayas have been called "the third pole" because the mountain range stores more snow and ice than any other region in the world except the North and South Poles. According to NASA, temperatures in this region have been increasing by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1980, a rate twice as high as the global average. And the impacts of global warming in the Himalayas are similar to those in the Arctic and Antarctic, with one big difference: Many more people live around this "third pole" than around the North or South Poles.

As a result of this relative population density, climate change is exacting human costs not just on Everest but in the entire region. Some 1.3 billion people depend on rivers that run from Himalayan glaciers like the Khumbu. A couple hundred million of those people live close enough to the mountains to be endangered by devastating wipeouts from glacial flood outbursts, which occur when glaciers melt into lakes and the lakes then overflow—"high-altitude disasters in the making," by one environmental journalist's estimation. There are thousands of glacial lakes in the Himalayas, and many of them are concentrated around Everest.

According to NASA, about 10 percent of Earth’s land surface is covered with ice, which is divided into roughly 200,000 glaciers—shown in blue on this map. (NASA/Robert Simmon, using data from the Randolph Glacier Inventory and Natural Earth.)

The UN's climate-change panel may have been wrong in 2007 when it estimated that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 (it later conceded that its predictions were "poorly substantiated"). But it's reiterating now that the world's tallest mountains truly are melting, endangering the water supplies of hundreds of millions of people in Asia.

These dramatic changes in climate are occurring at a time when human traffic on Everest is increasing. The best time to summit the mountain is in the middle of May, when the fierce winds of the jet stream, which whip around the summit almost all year long, temporarily move north. A perfect day to summit is one with little wind and no precipitation.

But there may be fewer of those days in the future. And yet, with the exception of this year, there will likely be more summit-seekers angling for positions on the route during narrowing, and increasingly unpredictable, windows of favorable weather. The mad Everest traffic jam of 2012 could become an annual affair.

Ralf Dujmovits took this now-iconic photo from Everest's South Col on May 18, 2012: A conga line of climbers en route to the summit, in what turned out to be a disastrous day on the mountain.

Crowded lines to the summit pose a different kind of danger than crumbling seracs in the Khumbu Icefall. The editors of Outside lay out the scenario like this: Hundreds of people show up at Base Camp—some with limited skills and experience but all committed to scaling Everest. As the climbing season reaches its peak, only one or two occasions may arise when conditions are ripe for ascent to the top. When that first "summit window" opens up, climbers race to take advantage of it, leading to dangerous bottlenecks in the mountain's high-altitude "death zone." (One solution to this issue might be to climb Everest at a different time of year; in the 1980s, for instance, more climbers attempted to scale Everest in the fall than in the spring.)

Increasingly volatile climactic conditions on Everest may have contributed to the premature end of the 2014 climbing season. But they're unlikely to put a permanent freeze on expeditions up the mountain—and not just because of the growing demand from climbers. A few years ago, ClimateWire interviewed a Sherpa who had participated in Sir Edmund Hillary's historic expedition and, upon returning to Base Camp in 2011, was shocked by how much had changed since 1953. He predicted the end of snow on Everest within the next few decades.

"It's going to be no more snow, only rock," he told a reporter. However, he also said that the livelihood of his community was of primary concern, and that keeping climbers away was not an option: "If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don't have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit."

The Everest avalanche - behind the headlines

Worst-ever climbing disaster on Mt. Everest: Was avalanche caused by global warming?

The icy slopes of Mount Everest have seen hundreds of deaths in the years since 1922, when seven people perished during the British Mount Everest Expedition.

Live Science

18 April, 2014

An avalanche today (April 18) claimed at least 12 lives, in what may be the single deadliest climbing event in the history of the world's tallest mountain (29,029 feet, or 8,848 meters). The death toll may rise, because other climbers are still missing, according to the BBC.

All of the deceased were guides from the ethnic Sherpa community, who were securing ropes for the start of the spring climbing season. And many Sherpas insist that Mount Everest and other mountains in the area have become more dangerous because of climate change. [Ice World: Gallery of Awe-Inspiring Glaciers]

"In 1989 when I first climbed Everest there was a lot of snow and ice, but now most of it has just become bare rock. That, as a result, is causing more rock falls, which is a danger to the climbers," said Apa Sherpa, a Nepali climber, as quoted in Discovery News.

"Also, climbing is becoming more difficult, because when you are on a [snowy] mountain you can wear crampons, but it's very dangerous and very slippery to walk on bare rock with crampons," he added.

Avalanches and climate change

Avalanches have been around for centuries, of course, and researchers can't blame any single event on climate change. Some evidence exists, however, that a warming planet and changes in precipitation may increse the likelihood of certain types of avalanches at certain times of the year. 

A 2001 study from the Annals of Glaciology found that increases in temperature and precipitation could slightly decrease the risk of avalanches in mid-winter in France, but could significantly increase the risk of spring avalanches.

Those findings were echoed in a 2013 report from the journal Applied Snow and Avalanche Research, which found that in Canada's Glacier National Park, an increase in rain (instead of snow) during the winter could result in greater instability in the snowpack, leading to more late-winter avalanches. 

Glacial lake outburst flooding

Apa Sherpa — who has conquered Everest more than 20 times — was once a farmer in the Himalayan region, but he turned to mountaineering after losing his home and his farm after a glacial lake outburst flood in 1985.

Researchers have warned that glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are a particularly disastrous effect of climate change. As glaciers melt, immense lakes form behind relatively weak ice dams. When the ice dams are breached, the resulting burst of water and debris can cause sudden, catastrophic flooding.

"In the Himalayas, catastrophic risks of GLOFs have increased in recent years because most Himalayan glaciers have experienced remarkable downwasting under a warming climate," according to the authors of a 2013 study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

The researchers found that between 1990 and 2010, more than 1,000 glacial lakes in the Himalayas expanded rapidly, increasing their surface area by more than 17 percent, presenting an immediate danger to climbers and residents. "An effective monitoring and warning system for critical glacial lakes is urgently needed," the study authors wrote.

Water supplies under threat

In another alarming finding, researchers from the University of Milan in Italy announced in 2013 that glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years, and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet (180 meters).

The glaciers are also shrinking at a faster rate, as regional precipitation has declined since 1992 by nearly 4 inches (10 cm) during the pre-monsoon and winter months, the Los Angeles Times reports. The loss of these glaciers could be catastrophic, since they provide water and power for about 1.5 billion people living in Asia.

The loss of glaciers in the region isn't uniform, however. A study published in the April 2012 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience found that glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range are holding steady, and some may even be growing in size due to changes in precipitation patterns.

The future of Everest

There's some concern in the mountaineering community that mountains like the iconic Everest may be unclimbable in the near future.

"What will happen in the future I cannot say but this much I can say from my own experiences — it has changed a lot," Apa Sherpa said.

In 2012, he completed a 120-day walk named the Climate Smart Celebrity Trek with the goal of raising awareness of climate change's impact on high-altitude mountain environments.

"I want to understand the impact of climate change on other people, but also I'd like tourism to play a role in changing their lives as it has changed mine," Apa Sherpa said.

Huge avalanche in Alaska

Record Alaskan Warmth and Rains Trigger Huge Avalanche That Isolates Valdez

Dr Jeff Masters

Figure 1. ‪The ‬Richardson Highway, the only road into Valdez, Alaska, lies blocked by a massive avalanche in this January 25, 2014 photo from the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Wunderground,

27 January, 2013

If you're wondering where California's missing precipitation has been going, look northwards to the south and southeast coasts of Alaska. The remarkably persistent ridge of high pressure that has blocked rain from falling in California during January has shunted all the rain-bearing low pressure systems northward, bringing exceptionally warm and wet weather to coastal Alaska. Heavy rains, snows, and warm temperatures helped trigger a‪ series of huge avalanches that began on Friday, which blocked a 52-mile long section of the ‬Richardson Highway, the only road into Valdez, Alaska (population 4,000), located about 120 miles east of Anchorage. The avalanches, called some of the largest avalanches ever observed in the region, blocked the Lowe River in Keystone Canyon, creating a large backup of water behind the snow and ice dam. The water level is slowly dropping, but a Flash Flood Watch has been posted for the region in case the avalanche dam suddenly releases. The highway is expected to be cleared no earlier than February 2, according to the city of Valdez website. Extra marine ferries will be running during the blockage to provide supplies to Valdez.

Record warmth and precipitation in Alaska

As of January 26, 13.83" of precipitation had fallen in Valdez during the month of January. This is more than 8" above average for this point in the month, and close to the all-time record for January precipitation of 15.18", set in 2001 (records go back to 1972.) With more rain on the way Monday and Tuesday, this record could easily fall. Numerous locations in Southeast Alaska have beaten their rainiest January day on record marks.

Wunderground's weather historian Christopher C. Burt has much more detail on the record Alaska January warmth in his latest post, Record Warmth in Alaska Contrasts Cold Wave in Eastern U.S. A few highlights:

• Temperatures of up to 40° above normal occurred across the interior and West Coast of Alaska on Sunday. Bolio Lake Range Complex in Fort Greely, Alaska, located about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, hit 60°. This is only 2° short of the all-time state January heat record of 62° set at Petersburg in 1981.

• At 10pm local time Sunday in Homer, Alaska, the temperature was 54°. This was warmer than any location in the contiguous U.S., except for Southern Florida and Southern California. The 55° high in Homer on Sunday broke their all-time monthly record by 4°.

• All-time January heat records have been set in 2014 in Nome, Denali Park, Palmer, Homer, Alyseka, Seward, and Talkeetna.