The floods picked up more debris and moved with greater speed after smashing into these barriers, which he called a “man-made disaster. Ravi Chopra, who heads the People’s Science Institute in Dehradun, the largest city in the state, said he views the disaster as “two events.” The falling of the rock and ice mass is a natural event, he said, but as it rolled down the river, it encountered barriers like bridges and dams. In a recent report, he found that the frequency and intensity of extreme flooding and landslides in Uttarakhand had increased fourfold in the past five decades.Įxperts have long warned about the role of infrastructure projects in exacerbating the impact of disasters like these. The latest disaster is “proof that the climate crisis can no longer be ignored,” said Abinash Mohanty, a researcher at the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water. The pace of warming in the Nanda Devi region appears possibly even a bit above average, with one long-standing temperature station about 80 miles from the disaster showing approximately 1.4 to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.5 to 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the late 19th and early 20th century.
The prominent Uttari Nanda Devi Glacier, for instance, is retreating at 72 feet per year.
Open House Lectures Live from Monell Auditorium. A study published last year looked at the area’s major glaciers and found that they had lost approximately 10 percent of their area since 1980, equivalent to 10 square miles of ice-covered slopes. To keep up with Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory news and events throughout the year, join our email list. In the part of the Indian Himalayas where the disaster occurred - the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve - glacial retreat is well documented.
0 kommentar(er)
