Nepal did little to cause the climate crisis. Now it is paying for its consequences.

On the morning of August 26, a slab of ice and rock broke away from roughly 5,200 metres on the flank of the Langtang massif, on the border Nepal shares with Tibet, and fell some 1,200 vertical metres into the valley of the Lhende Khola.

Seismometers registered the impact as the equivalent of a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. The debris dammed the river, then gave way . Downstream at Galchhi, the Trishuli rose about nine metres in thirty minutes, a wall of what one researcher called liquid concrete, travelling roughly a hundred kilometres through Rasuwa and Nuwakot.