The floods were triggered after a collapse of bedrock and glacier ice sent debris and water surging through multiple Himalayan rivers, according to Associated Press (AP).
The death toll has risen to over 1,400, reports MSN. More than 6,000 people remain missing.
AP says some scientists say the Earth's temperature is rising at a faster rate because of the burning of fossil fuels and that the chances of such disasters increase, especially in the Himalayan mountains, which some say are warming faster than other parts of the world.
Dr. David Legates, a climatologist with the Cornwall Alliance, talked about something he'd seen in an article on the Himalayas warming faster.
“I thought the Arctic was warming faster than the rest of the world, and the Arctic is a whole lot bigger than the Himalayas. At least it was on my globe,” Legates says facetiously.
He offered some perspective on the tragic floods.
“Let's suppose this happened 100 years ago, how would we have seen this?” Legates asks. “First of all, there would have likely not been many people dead because there just weren't that many people around, and they weren't generally living in dangerous areas.”
The second thing, all that would have been known, he said, is that there was an event — some wall of water and debris and stuff came blasting down from the mountain. Civilization wouldn’t know what happened because there were no satellites to review to figure it out.
“The reporting is going to be down because 100 years ago, what was covered in the news from that international? You didn't have CNN, you didn't have television, you wouldn't have pictures of it,” Legates says.
He compared to what happened in Nepal to other events in history, including a fast-moving debris avalanche in Peru in 1962 that buried a town and killed an estimated 4,000 people, which he noted, was before the so-called global warming era.
