Nepal’s devastating floods reveal the danger of ‘cascading hazards’ in Himalayas

By Daniel Parsons, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, and Professor of Geosciences, Loughborough University

The devastating floods that have swept through the Nepal–Tibet border region are first and foremost a human tragedy. Hundreds of people have died or remain missing.

But as scientists begin to reconstruct what happened, the event also exposes something fundamental about the way we understand natural hazards in high mountain regions. Mountains and rivers do not reset after an extreme event. A landslide changes a slope. A flood rearranges a river. A retreating glacier exposes sediment and unstable ground. Each…

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