Shortly after midnight Tuesday, 5,000 meters up in the Himalayas just south of India’s border with China, a slight shift started an avalanche. Snow, ice and boulders slid into a giant glacial lake 1.5 kilometers below, causing it to burst its banks. From there, catastrophes multiplied as the water cascaded down mountain valleys below.
At least 26 people were killed in the tiny state of Sikkim, and another 142 are missing. But as much as the disaster was a shock, it was hardly a surprise. An academic paper published four years earlier predicted just such a sequence of events in harrowing detail.
The effects of climate change within the world’s most dramatic mountain range have snapped together like deadly clockwork — and hundreds of other ticking time bombs dot the landscape.
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