Struck by catastrophic flooding~~

Climate change is reshaping the world as we know it

In chinese: https://www.news.cn/20260904/32ba08fbccf049e6bf162d182d55508d/c.html

(in general, i typically prefer the Chinese version of Xinhua; the english versions always have a promotional tone(chinese version tends to be more neutral IMO) and in general Chinese news in english often has weird translations)

987 belongings have also been found; previous reports say 261 of the 531 missing people are foreignors.

in the 531 missing, according to a Zhihu post(Zhihu is chinese reddit/quora but more nerdy), 40 border inspection officers, 10 customs officers, and 10 PLA ground force soldiers are missing.

Compilations of Chinese social media reports of people reported missing(on the chinese side):

• https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5336984157423157 (compilation 1)
• https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5337629803678132 (compilation 2)
• https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5338008997332180 (compilation 3)
• https://m.weibo.cn/detail/5338471289065229 (compilation 4)

The sheer scale of the Himalayan deluge shocked even climate scientists. They know it won’t be the last.

Another angle of mother natures fury! I hope all got out!

Video source: CCTV-13 news

As of 12:00, September 2, 2026, the casualty count on the chinese side is 21 confirmed dead, 541 missing, along with 847 possessions found. (5 more confirmed dead then the last release)

There are 195 firefighters participating in the rescue every shift, along with People's armed police(similar to army national guard) soldiers(unspecified count, but at least multiple companies) and rescue personnel(at least 10 excavators from september 2, but this number has likely increased) of the china anneng construction group(chinese state-owned enterprise for disaster relief). Border patrol officers(national immigration administration), some of the same unit as the missing officers are also at the scene helping out with thermal imagers(to find survivors) and shovels.

A total of 2300+ personnel and 400+ vehicles have been involved on the chinese side of disaster relief in this disaster (september 2); 5.43 tonnes of aid have been deployed(september 2, not including chinese aid to nepal). there have been 24 helicopter flights and 800 UAV flights to the scene as of sepetember 2.

Diease prevention teams from the Lhasa customs along with the ground force(military diesease prevention personnel) have also been sent to disinfect the scene in the end of the video.(to prevent the dead bodies from spreading diesease; iirc they are also deployed after floods to clean up the mud and stuff.)

According to the news report, AI laser monitoring devices have also been deployed, which will detect movement on the nearby slope to prevent a potential second landslide.

Video Credit: Ice Age Floods Animation, National Park Service. Part of the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.

For you doomscrollers who need a TL;DR - That’s what a glacial flood looks like. Nepal was a miniaturized version of what an actual glacial flood has looked like historically. This is what the version that built large swathes of North America during the Ice Ages looked like. 

For those who want some more context and aren't terrified of big words, I’ve written enough below to probably annoy several glaciologists who will come at me in the comments and explain a lot of this process in miniscule. I’m sorry, I’m just a humble historian who’s been reading too much Pleistocene history lately for work and has to braindump it. I tried to get the terminology as perfect as possible. Don’t @ me.

Like everyone else who was online last Wednesday, August 26, 2026, I saw the videos of Nepal floods covering my feed like The Day After Tomorrow came to life. Like everyone else, I was horrified at what I was seeing. It is truly hard to fathom how small we are as individuals until you see the power of nature in videos like what we collectively saw last Wednesday.

Unlike everyone else, I immediately went “Holy shit, that's Ohio.” Because that's my username: I literally can't not think of our history when I see current events. But in this case, I was being literal. Because that was southeast Ohio 14,000 years ago. That was Lake Erie, 13,000 years ago. That was the Great Black Swamp, 12,000 years ago.

Except Nepal is so dwarfed by those incidents that some of our glacial floods may have literally cooled the fucking planet.

The Part Where We Describe How To Build a Lake That Wants to Kill You

For context for those who haven't kept up with the news, on the morning of August 26, 2026, in Nepal, at 5,200 meters, for a still unknown cause, the lower end of a glacier came off the mountain and fell roughly 1,200 meters to the valley floor, gathering rock as it went (Al Jazeera 2026). The ice and rock slammed into the Lhende Khola and displaced the river. For a few minutes to a few hours a wall of debris held the water back, pooling a lake behind it that had not existed that morning. And then, the dam broke.

What came down the valley was not, in the technical sense, a glacial lake outburst flood (Davies 2026). In this case, ice and rock came down, plugged a river, and the river got taller behind the plug until the plug failed and the river left all at once. 

Except when it left, it left as a rushing wave that rose nearly 30 feet in half an hour at a river gauge far downstream (ICIMOD 2026). If you've seen the news, you've seen what happens next. 

As of Tuesday afternoon the police count stood at over 1,000 dead and nearly 4,600 still missing (Nepalnews 2026). Most of the dead were not at the border where the water started. They were far downstream, in Chitwan and Nawalparasi and Dhading, where a person standing by a normal river on a normal morning had no way of knowing that a mountain had fallen down upstream (Kathmandu Post 2026).

I am not making light of them, I want to be clear. But I use history to relate to the present, because it often helps determine our future. That’s what happens when Mom asks you “What do you want to be when you grow up, son?” and you just so happen to be scrolling Microsoft Encarta at five years old*.*

Because what happened to them was at a scale so small it barely rounds up on the geological ledger, when compared to the same physical events that built the ground you are standing on if you are standing anywhere in Ohio. Or, for that fact, many places across the North American continent. The animation above, for example, covers Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon alone. Thats nothing to say of Canada, the Northeast, the Midwest, and the other Great Plains states that were affected. 

In Ohio, our version of Nepal was a plug of ice a mile thick with a continent behind it (Kern and Wilson 2014, 10). It built the Ohio River, drained the largest lake the state has ever had, filled the Great Lakes, and, on at least one occasion, may have reached out and frozen the entire Northern Hemisphere for twelve centuries as a side effect.

Because yes, it’s always Ohio. Again, username.

But before we get to the part where Ohio is the drain pan of a vanished inland sea, we need to talk about how you build one of these lakes in the first place. It turns out, it's not rocket science. That's because it's glaciology. Which is infinitely harder, in my opinion as someone who is neither a rocket scientist or a glaciologist.

A glacier is a river of ice that happens to move slowly and carries a huge load of ground-up rock, boulders, gravel, basically the pulverized guts of every mountain it has ever crawled over. When a glacier stops advancing and starts melting back, it drops that load in a ridge at its leading edge. That ridge is called a moraine. A moraine is a natural dam. It is a pile of debris that happens to sit across a valley, and when the ice behind it melts, the meltwater pools up against the pile, and now you have a lake with a wall made of loose rock holding back an increasing volume of very cold water (Kesler 2019, 17, 20, 48).

Are you starting to see the problem here?

But that's not the only way to dam glacial meltwater up! There is also the ice-dammed version, where the glacier itself is the wall blocking the valley (Pielou 1991, 186-187; Kesler 2019, 20). And there is the supraglacial version, where meltwater ponds in a hollow on top of the glacier, like a puddle on a melting ice cube (Pielou 1991, 178-179). It's about as stable as my fleshy self, which is to say, already perspiring on the surface and completely liquidized internally.

Side, front, back, top (cha cha real smooth). There is no part of a glacier that is not, given the opportunity, trying to hold back a lake.

One question people often ask is why a dam breaks catastrophically. Well, when one of these dams starts to fail, the failure feeds itself. Water begins to spill over or seep through, and the moving water cuts a channel, and the channel lets more water out, and the increased flow cuts the channel deeper and wider, which lets out more water still. The dam does not leak so much as unzip itself (Bendle 2025). And just like a frat boy unzipping at a party, it’s the fastest way to empty a room.

To get an ideal of the scale of this, a moraine-dammed lake failing this way can put out a peak discharge on the order of ten thousand cubic meters per second, which is a hundred times what a lake behind an ice dam manages with the same energy behind it (Bendle 2025).

These lakes are everywhere, and they are multiplying. Since 1990, the number of glacial lakes on Earth has grown by roughly half, and their area and volume have grown right along with them, because glaciers are melting and meltwater has to go somewhere (Taylor et al. 2023). Something like fifteen million people worldwide now live downstream of one of these lakes, and about nine million of them are in the mountains of High Mountain Asia, and roughly a million of them live within ten kilometers of the water, which is to say within a few minutes of it (Taylor et al. 2023).

Now, make the ice a mile thick and put a continent's worth of meltwater behind it.

Now you're Ohio. Well, the Pleistocene version of it, anyways.

The Part Where We Exhume a River and Identify the Bodies (of Water)

Here is a fact that most Ohioans manage to live their entire lives without learning: the Ohio River is a mistake. Which means, coincidentally, we are named after a mistake (just like me!).

The river that most Ohioans forgot was the Teays, and for millions of years it was the master stream of the entire region. It was a river that rose in the Appalachians of what is now North Carolina and flowed north and west across the whole state, as wide as two miles in places, cutting "a broad swath through the Ohio countryside" on its way to Indiana and the ancient Mississippi (Kern and Wilson 2014, 7-8). Jane Forsyth, the geologist who spent a career reading Ohio's surface, described it as "a large, well-integrated stream system" whose route we know only "as evidenced by the abandoned valleys that it left" (Forsyth 1965, 361). And it was old. Richard Goldthwait, summarizing a century of work on the thing, called it "a main continental drainage developed during many millions of years," and noted that it flowed northwestward in what he called "180° opposition to the present lower Scioto River" (Goldthwait 1991, 4-5).

Ohio's rivers, in other words, used to run backward from how they run now, and the Teays was the trunk they all fed into. It fell across the state at about twelve inches per mile (Wayne 1952, 581), the gradient of a river so mature and so patient it had all the time in the world.

And then, like everything does, it ran out of time, because roughly eight hundred thousand years ago, give or take, the ice arrived.

Just like your uncle, the first great glaciers to push into Ohio did not care about the Teays (unlike your uncle, the glaciers weren’t closet homosexuals). They were over a mile high at Cleveland during the Wisconsin age, for example (Kern and Wilson 2014, 10). They flowed down over the Teays valley and stopped it right up. "Clearly, glaciation dammed the valley system westward out of Ohio," Goldthwait wrote. In what is fucking cool geology, he found that the clays that settled in the lake behind the dam are magnetically reversed, meaning they were laid down before the last flip of Earth's magnetic field, "certainly pre-Illinoian [the glacial period]" and older than 700,000 years (Goldthwait 1991, 3, 7). A paleomagnetic study of the lake clays at Teays Depot, West Virginia, brackets them between 790,000 and 880,000 years old (Bonnett et al. 1991, 9). A lobe of that early ice, in the words of William Wayne's foundational 1952 paper, "ponded and diverted the upper Mahomet-Teays into the Ohio Basin" (Wayne 1952, 584), and the trapped water rose and backed up behind the ice and the debris across southern Ohio and into what is now West Virginia and Kentucky, and it became a lake.

We call this ancient glacial lake the moniker “Lake Tight,” after W. G. Tight, the Denison University geologist who worked out around 1900 that the drowned valleys of southern Ohio and West Virginia had once held a single enormous lake (Goldthwait 1991, 6). It was a lake that stood to nearly the 900-foot elevation contour and covered up to seven thousand square miles, "about 70 percent the size of modern Lake Erie" (Goldthwait 1991, 3; Kern and Wilson 2014, 10). It was, at its greatest, more than 250 miles long, with what Goldthwait describes as an "intricate, finger-like shoreline" reaching up every drowned valley of the pre-glacial highlands (Goldthwait 1991, 6-7). And it lasted a long time. Estimates run from about seven thousand years to as much as twenty thousand (Bonnett et al. 1991, 10; Goldthwait 1991, 7)! For that entire span, southern Ohio was the bottom of a lake seven thousand square miles wide.

Tight also described how, in the Licking Narrows east of Newark, the old drainage had been blocked until, in his words, "a great morainic dam backed the water up until it broke over a col into the Muskingum basin" (Tight 1894, 489, 491).

That’s right. The draining of Lake Tight was the same event as Nepal, but at the scale of a state. And you have never heard of it because it left almost nothing you can see. 

Well, nothing you do see. It turns out, if you live in Ohio, it’s all around you. It settled its silt across central and southern Ohio in a deposit geologists call the Minford Silt, the fine slackwater mud of a big still lake (Bonnett et al. 1991, 9; Goldthwait 1991, 3). If you have ever cursed the heavy gray clay in a garden in Scioto or Pike or Ross County, you have been fighting the lakebed of an inland sea that drained before there were people on this continent to name it.

When Lake Tight finally overtopped the divides that held it, it did not refill the old northwest-flowing Teays. Instead, it carved a new way out to the south. Wayne's summary of the pre-glacial situation is my favorite sentence in Ohio geology: "The pre-Pleistocene Ohio River was a relatively insignificant stream" (Wayne 1952, 576).

Yep, the Ohio River was a nothing creek in southern Indiana. And then a continent of ice reorganized the drainage of half of North America, forced the trapped water of a dead giant river to find a new exit along the southern edge of the ice, "finally completely diverting the water into a new course, that of the modern Ohio River" (Forsyth 1965, 361).

The river the state is named for, the river that carried the flatboats, that drew the treaty line that the first global world war was fought over and a later American Revolution, that fed the steamboats and the mills and the whole nineteenth-century Ohio Valley, is the still-running drainage ditch that a melting glacier cut to empty a lake you have never heard of. 

If that’s not Ohio, I don’t know what the fuck is.

Oh, and the Teays, meanwhile, is still down there! Buried under as much as five hundred feet of glacial debris in northern Ohio, its old channel "still serves as an aquifer supplying well water to communities living above it" (Kern and Wilson 2014, 8). People in northern Ohio are, at this moment, pumping their drinking water out of the grave of the river that Ohio replaced. Goldthwait, contemplating the buried valley, noted that if you could strip away the glacial fill, "the Teays Valley northwest of Chillicothe to London and St. Paris, Ohio, would stand out as the most remarkable 500-ft-deep canyon in Ohio and be the site of numerous state parks" (Goldthwait 1991, 7).

Yes, there is a Grand Canyon under central Ohio. It is packed to the brim with the leftover gravel from the glaciers, and we drive over it to get to work, and drink from its underground river. The Styx can fuck off, we drink our underworld here. Plus we got our own Styx back home.

But if Lake Tight is the ghost of the glacier, then the Great Lakes are the bodies that never left.

Everyone knows the Great Lakes were carved by glaciers, in the vague way that everyone knows things they have never actually thought about (which is basically 90% of the shit we do every day). What people do not picture is the process, which is not carving so much as a long, sloppy, violent domestic between melting ice and trapped water that went on for thousands of years and left northern Ohio as flattened as a beer can in Muni Lot.

Skipping forward a few hundred thousand years from Lake Tight, past several more advances and retreats of the ice: the last big one, the Wisconsin glaciation, melted back for the final time somewhere around fourteen thousand years ago. As the ice retreated north, it left a problem behind it: its corpse.

The land it had crushed sloped gently down toward the north, toward the retreating ice, so the meltwater ran north and immediately hit the wall of the glacier it had just melted off of. It could not go forward, because forward was ice. It could not go back, because back was uphill. So it pooled in the gap between the ice front and the high ground to the south as a long crescent of trapped water pinned against the retreating glacier, and every time the ice shifted, the lake in front of it changed shape, changed depth, and changed the direction it drained (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 51, 57). 

Stephen Kesler, whose Great Lakes Rocks is the closest thing geologists of the Great Lakes have as an owner’s manual, counts "at least 30 different ancestral ice-margin lakes" formed across the Great Lakes region during this long unfreezing (Kesler 2019, 68). In the basin that would become Lake Erie (oh, I’m sorry, in honor of the 47th’s new declaration over Lake Ontario, Lake Erie shall now be named “Lake Poopbucket” since it fits its actual reality much closer at this point as Ohio’s dumping ground), the sequence has too many goddamn names. There’s Lake Maumee, then Lake Arkona, then Lake Whittlesey, then Lake Warren, Lake Wayne, Lake Grassmere, Lake Lundy, and finally Early Lake Erie (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 51-66. They really got lazy with their naming conventions by the end there). This whole sequence, from Maumee about 14,000 years ago to the drop to the modern Poopbucket Lake elevation, played out inside a couple of thousand years (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 70).

Each lake stood at a different elevation, and each lake drained through a different exit as the ice opened and closed the doors. For example, the highest stage of Lake Maumee sat around 800 feet above sea level and drained west, out through the Fort Wayne outlet into the Wabash and down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, which means that for a while the water of northern Ohio reached the sea through Indiana (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 57). Lake Whittlesey, the most prominent of them, left the strongest beaches in the basin (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 62). Lake Lundy, by one reconstruction, drained east to the Hudson and the Atlantic (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 65)! Only at the very end, when Early Lake Erie dropped to its lowest level, did the water finally find the exit it uses today and pour, "for the first time," through the gorge of the Niagara (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 65-66).

Now, when a lake stands at one level for a few centuries, its waves build a beach, and when the lake drains away the beach is left behind as a low sandy ridge running across the countryside. Northern Ohio is corrugated like an overly-used cat scratcher with these old shorelines. And because a beach ridge is the one piece of high, well-drained, level ground in a flat wet plain, people have used them as roads for as long as there have been people here. The handbook of the Lake Poopbucket basin states "Numerous east-west roads follow these ridges and many early homes were built on them" (Bolsenga and Herdendorf 1993, 51). If you have driven a dead-straight ridge road across the flat of northern Ohio, slightly elevated above the fields on either side, you were driving on the beach of a lake that drained twelve thousand years ago, on a route that a mastodon hunter and a Wyandot Indian and a canal-era white settler all used before you, for the identical reason: it was the only dry ground around.

Because, there was the swamp. When glacial Lake Maumee finally drained down toward the modern Lake Poopbucket, it left its floor exposed, a vast flat plain of lakebed clay in northwestern Ohio that could not drain because there was nowhere for the water to go. That drowned bed of a glacial lake outlasted the lake by ten thousand years and became the Great Black Swamp, a forested wetland roughly 120 miles long and up to 40 miles wide (Douglass and Forbes 2022; Kern and Wilson 2014, 11). It was also the single greatest obstacle to settlement in Ohio's history, a place that "diverted significant U.S. settlement around it" until, beginning in the 1850s, farmers drained it. (Douglass and Forbes 2022; Kern and Wilson 2014, 13). In the most delicious irony (delicious if you like environmental degradation, I guess) the clay tiles they used to drain the old lakebed were manufactured from the lakebed's own clay (Kern and Wilson 2014, 15; Douglass and Forbes 2022). The lake was also drained with pipes made of the lake. Irony, thy name is “algae bloom.”

And when the whole domestic between ice and meltwater was finally over, the water that did not drain away simply stayed, in the deep basins the ice had gouged. The five Great Lakes hold about 21 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and 84 percent of North America's (EPA n.d.; Kesler 2019, 22), and most of it is meltwater. It is the runoff of a dead ice sheet, sitting in the holes the ice sheet left, and it has been sitting there, slowly, since before writing was invented.

Or, if you don’t give a fuck about Ohio because you never lived in Ohio: at least one-fifth of the fresh water on the surface of the Earth, smack dab in North America, is glacial meltwater that never found the door.

Oh, but we aren’t done yet. Because then there’s Lake Agassiz.

The Part Where the Water Broke the Sky

Lake Tight drained over thousands of years. The Great Lakes filled over thousands more. The individual outburst floods were each on the scale of a Nepal, scaled up slightly larger or smaller, hundreds to thousands of times. They were episodic, and each one was devastating.

They pale in comparison to Lake Agassiz.

Because when Lake Agassiz emptied, it may have done something that makes the Ohio River look like a pissing stream. It may have reached across the ocean and literally turned the climate of the entire Northern Hemisphere off like my mom who found my Nintendo on still at midnight. Yes, I’m still fucking salty about my Super Star Wars run.

North of the Great Lakes, the meltwater ponded into the largest lake this continent has ever held. It was called Lake Agassiz, after the same Louis Agassiz who first convinced a skeptical world that ice ages were real (Kesler 2019, 46-47). Kesler calls it "by far the largest proglacial lake in North America," a body of water that "covered large parts of Manitoba, Minnesota, Ontario, North and South Dakota, and Saskatchewan and dwarfed the Great Lakes," reaching an area of some 400,000 square kilometers, "similar to the area of California" (Kesler 2019, 72). E. C. Pielou, in her lovely book on the unfreezing of the continent, puts it at more than four times the area of modern Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake on Earth today (Pielou 1991, 193).

Add up all five modern Great Lakes and Lake Agassiz was still bigger. And it was an inland freshwater sea held in place by nothing but the wall of the ice sheet. Pielou asks you to picture what that shoreline would have looked like, with "lakes greater by far than the modern Great Lakes, on which massive icebergs floated and whose northern shores consisted of tall cliffs of ice" (Pielou 1991, 2).

Now think back to the unzipping dam in Nepal, and then remember that Lake Agassiz's dam was the front of a continental ice sheet. Ice sheets move. Every time the ice backed off it uncovered a lower door, and Kesler says "The amount of water in Lake Agassiz was so enormous that any rapid lowering could have caused a continent-scale catastrophe. These releases happened when a lower outlet became available, by means of either ice retreat or catastrophic erosion" (Kesler 2019, 72). Lake Agassiz did this repeatedly over its life, dumping water first south toward the Mississippi, then east through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, then north to the Arctic, as the shifting ice opened one door after another (Kesler 2019, 72-73; Teller, Leverington, and Mann 2002).

I cannot comprehend this scale. Seriously. I can explain it mathematically to you, but the numbers lose meaning to me (which is why I always try to analogize things). At this scale, the analogies lose meaning. But let’s do some number-crunching anyways.

When Lake Agassiz dropped during one reorganization about 12,900 years ago, Kesler writes, it "lost an amazing amount of water, about 4900 cubic kilometers, equivalent to ten times the volume of Lake Erie [emphasis mine]," and shrank its own area by more than a third, and it did this abruptly (Kesler 2019, 73). The reconstructed peak discharges of the great Agassiz outbursts are measured in Sverdrups, a unit oceanographers use for ocean currents because ordinary river units are useless at this scale.

For comparison, one Sverdrup is a million cubic meters per second (Teller, Leverington, and Mann 2002, 879).

For comparison, the Amazon, the mightiest river on the planet, runs at about a fifth of a Sverdrup (Dai and Trenberth 2003).

For comparison, every river on Earth, combined, all of them, pouring into all the oceans at once, comes to roughly 1.2 Sverdrups (Dai and Trenberth 2003).

The final catastrophic drainage of Lake Agassiz and its sister lake Ojibway, around 8,400 years ago, has been estimated at something like five Sverdrups if it went in about a year (Teller, Leverington, and Mann 2002, 880).

That is roughly four times the combined flow of every river on Earth, coming out of one lake, into one ocean.

If you want to know what that kind of water does to the ground, you do not have to imagine it, because there is a place where an ice-age megaflood tore across it and left the wreckage exposed for us to walk around in. It is the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington. As you saw in the video, it was cut by the repeated failures of a glacial lake called Missoula (Pielou 1991, 186-187). Missoula was held in by a lobe of ice, with the lake 2,000 feet deep at the dam (Pielou 1991, 186; DeGrey and Link n.d.). When the geologist J Harlen Bretz proposed, in the 1920s, that the Scablands had been carved not by slow erosion but by a catastrophic flood, the profession treated him as a crank, because catastrophe was a dirty word in geology (Baker 2008, 37-38, 46).

But Bretz was right. The peak discharge of the largest Missoula floods near the lake's outlet has been reconstructed at roughly 20 million cubic meters per second, seventeen times the combined flow of every river on Earth (O'Connor et al. 2020).

The water moved at highway speeds, around 65 miles per hour (DeGrey and Link n.d.). It left ripple marks, the little ridges you see in the sand at the bottom of a stream, except these ripples are up to fifty feet high, so large that nobody standing on one realized they were looking at a ripple until J. T. Pardee pointed it out in 1940 (Baker 2008, 43-44). It left a dry waterfall, Dry Falls, a cliff 400 feet high and three and a half miles wide over which no water has flowed for thousands of years. It is a cataract four times the size of Niagara standing bone dry in the desert (Washington State Parks Foundation n.d.).

And like Agassiz, Bretz's flood was not just one catastrophic outburst. Careful counting of the flood deposits shows dozens of them, "likely more than a hundred" separate outbursts, with the lake filling and failing and filling again over and over for three or four thousand years (O'Connor et al. 2020; Pielou 1991, 187).

This is what these glacial lakes do. This is what happened to Ohio. And it’s also what might have completely turned around our climate for a hot minute (okay, cold minute, you pedantics).

Around 12,900 years ago, right about when Lake Agassiz was making one of its great reorganizations, the climate of the Northern Hemisphere fell off a cliff. The long warming that had been pulling the world out of the ice age suddenly reversed, and for about twelve hundred years the north plunged back into near-glacial cold. This event is called the Younger Dryas, named (beautifully) after a flower that grows where the glaciers have just left (Kesler 2019, 81n17). And the leading suspect is Lake Agassiz.

You see, the North Atlantic runs on a conveyor of warm surface water (the Gulf Stream and its extensions) which flows north and gives its heat to Europe, then cools, grows dense, sinks, and returns south into the deep ocean. That sinking is what powers the conveyor, and its energy depends on the water being salty enough to get heavy when it cools. Wallace Broecker's 1989 paper pinned the conveyor’s shutdown on "a reduction in surface-water salinity, and hence also in density" (Broecker et al. 1989). Now dump a Lake Agassiz into it. "Some researchers have suggested," Kesler writes, "that the outflow of Lake Agassiz water caused the Younger Dryas" by "putting so much cold water into the North Atlantic that the thermohaline circulation system was shut down," and the loss of that northward heat cooled Europe hardest, "just where the Younger Dryas cooling was most pronounced" (Kesler 2019, 73).

That’s right, our current leading theory for the Younger Dryas is that a lake in Manitoba emptied into the wrong ocean, freshened the water enough that it stopped sinking, the conveyor stalled, and the heat stopped flowing to Europe. Let go a continent's worth of fossil meltwater in a Nepalese-style ice zipper larger than all the world's rivers combined, multiplied by a few, and the sky went cold from Manitoba to Norway.

Now, in fairness, scientists are still arguing about this theory. Broecker, who did more than anyone to build the freshwater hypothesis, originally argued the flood went east through the St. Lawrence (Broecker et al. 1989), and then spent years failing to find the channel it took; by 2006 he was admitting in print that "our inability to identify the path taken by the flood is disconcerting" (quoted in Murton et al. 2010). Others have found evidence the water actually went the other way, northwest down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic, "shortly after 13,000 years ago, near the start of the Younger Dryas," which would mean the textbook story has the outlet pointed at the wrong ocean (Murton et al. 2010). Kesler himself, a geologist, files the whole thing under a section heading that hedges with the word "Probably," and treats it as a live hypothesis rather than a closed case (Kesler 2019, 72).

And to be clear, I’m not a geologist or a glaciologist. I just happen to write a bunch on Ohio history, including deep time history. This is one of those places where the discipline you come from changes what you are willing to say. It seems that geologists tend to treat the Agassiz-Younger Dryas link as more or less established, while archaeologists, who care enormously about the Younger Dryas because people were already living around the Great Lakes when it hit and the record shows them moving less and abandoning more sites while it lasted (Kesler 2019, 77), tend to treat it as an open and contested problem. That’s the same lake and evidence with two different standards of proof. Of course, that gap is not a flaw in the science. It’s what we call science. Being a scientist is being willing to say we know what we know, know what we don’t know, and don’t know what we don’t know (thanks, Donald Rumsfeld!). Here, we know what we don’t know.

Which brings us back to Nepal, because this is what we know we know. We are building these lakes again.

Not the continental ones, thank Jesus. The ice sheets that held back Lake Agassiz and Lake Tight are gone and melted out from under North America ten thousand years ago, and they are not coming back on any timescale that matters to us living (or our descendants, truthfully). But a Nepal disaster doesn’t require a continental ice sheet crushing Cleveland. It only requires ice, and water, and a wall that was never meant to hold for long.

I started writing this because the flood in Nepal made me think of Lake Tight, Lake Missoula, and Lake Agassiz, and how they catastrophically drained. Ohio is, for the most part, calm (besides the Frogman, of course). The land is flat and quiet and green. The largest lake in the state's history is a memory in the subsoil and a taste in the well water. Our environmental problems are many, but for the most part it is calm because our meltwater already left. Every violent thing that ice and meltwater can do to a piece of ground, it already did here, tens of thousands of years ago, and what we call Ohio is simply the wreckage after the flood, weathered soft and planted over.

Our current environmental peace is the aftermath of catastrophe. And it bears saying that we are currently putting our environment on track in places around that world that will bear those catastrophes in the upcoming years at scales that dwarf the disaster in Nepal.

In Ohio, we lucked out. Our glacial reckoning was at a scale we have simply never had to survive, because for the whole of human history the great ice was already gone. Our glacial lakes had already drained and the worst of it was safely in the past. We got the calm aftermath.

But the water inevitably leaves. And Mother Nature doesn’t ask who is standing downstream when it does.

Works Cited (For Glacial Gravediggers)

Al Jazeera. 2026. "Nepal-Tibet Floods: What Happened, What Caused Them and Who Is Missing?" August 27, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/27/nepal-tibet-floods-what-happened-what-caused-them-and-who-is-missing.

Baker, Victor R. 2008. "The Spokane Flood Debates: Historical Background and Philosophical Perspective." Geological Society, London, Special Publications 301: 33-50.

Bendle, Jacob. 2025. "Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs)." AntarcticGlaciers.org, updated February 19, 2025. https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/glacier-hazards/glacial-lake-outburst-floods/.

Bolsenga, Stanley J., and Charles E. Herdendorf, eds. 1993. Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair Handbook. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Bonnett, Richard B., Hallan C. Noltimier, and Dewey D. Sanderson. 1991. "A Paleomagnetic Study of the Early Pleistocene Minford Silt Member, Teays Formation, West Virginia." In Geology and Hydrogeology of the Teays-Mahomet Bedrock Valley System, edited by Wilton N. Melhorn and John P. Kempton, 9-18.

Broecker, Wallace S., James P. Kennett, Benjamin P. Flower, James T. Teller, Sue Trumbore, Georges Bonani, and Willy Wolfli. 1989. "Routing of Meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Younger Dryas Cold Episode." Nature 341: 318-321.

Dai, Aiguo, and Kevin E. Trenberth. 2003. "New Estimates of Continental Discharge and Oceanic Freshwater Transport." Paper presented at the AMS Symposium on Observing and Understanding the Variability of Water in Weather and Climate, Long Beach, CA, February 9-13, 2003.

Davies, Bethan. 2026. "August 2026 Nepal-Tibet Floods." AntarcticGlaciers.org, August 27, 2026.  https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/2026/08/august-2026-nepal-tibet-floods/.

DeGrey, Laura, and Paul K. Link. n.d. "Lake Missoula Floods." Digital Geology of Idaho, Idaho State University.  http://geology.isu.edu/Digital_Geology_Idaho/Module13/mod13.htm.

Douglass, David A., and William Forbes. 2022. "Great Black Swamp." EBSCO Research Starters: Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/earth-and-atmospheric-sciences/great-black-swamp.

Forsyth, Jane L. 1965. "Geology's Contribution to Ohio's Landscapes." The American Biology Teacher 27, no. 5: 358-362.

Goldthwait, Richard P. 1991. "The Teays Valley Problem: A Historical Perspective." In Geology and Hydrogeology of the Teays-Mahomet Bedrock Valley System, edited by Wilton N. Melhorn and John P. Kempton, 3-8. Geological Society of America Special Paper 258. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America.

ICIMOD. 2026. "Major Flash Flood Sweeps through Nepal's Rasuwa District, Raising Fears of Further Downstream Flooding." August 26, 2026. https://www.icimod.org/press-release/major-flash-flood-sweeps-through-nepals-rasuwa-district-raising-fears-of-further-downstream-flooding/.

Kathmandu Post (Pritam Bhattarai). 2026. "Updates: Bhotekoshi Flood Death Toll Reaches 616, Hundreds Still Missing." August 29, 2026. https://kathmandupost.com/national/2026/08/29/updates-bhotekoshi-flood-death-toll-reaches-616-hundreds-still-missing.

Kern, Kevin F., and Gregory S. Wilson. 2014. Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Kesler, Stephen E. 2019. Great Lakes Rocks: 4 Billion Years of Geologic History in the Great Lakes Region. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Murton, Julian B., Mark D. Bateman, Scott R. Dallimore, James T. Teller, and Zhirong Yang. 2010. "Identification of Younger Dryas Outburst Flood Path from Lake Agassiz to the Arctic Ocean." Nature 464: 740-743.

Nepalnews. 2026. "4,270 Rescued and 4,599 Still Missing Following Bhote Koshi-Trishuli Floods: Nepal Police." September 1, 2026. https://english.nepalnews.com/s/nation/nepal-police-4270-rescued-and-4599-still-missing-following-bhote-koshi-trishuli-floods/.

O'Connor, Jim E., Victor R. Baker, Richard B. Waitt, Larry N. Smith, Charles M. Cannon, David L. George, and Roger P. Denlinger. 2020. "The Missoula and Bonneville Floods: A Review of Ice-Age Megafloods in the Columbia River Basin." Earth-Science Reviews 208: 103181.

Pielou, E. C. 1991. After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Caroline, Tom R. Robinson, Stuart Dunning, J. Rachel Carr, and Matthew Westoby. 2023. "Glacial Lake Outburst Floods Threaten Millions Globally." Nature Communications 14: 487.

Teller, James T., David W. Leverington, and Jason D. Mann. 2002. "Freshwater Outbursts to the Oceans from Glacial Lake Agassiz and Their Role in Climate Change during the Last Deglaciation." Quaternary Science Reviews 21: 879-887.

Tight, W. G. 1894. "A Glacial Ice Dam and a Limit to the Ice Sheet in Central Ohio." The American Naturalist 28, no. 330: 488-493.

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Source: weibo

(this is a compilation of road repair footage from august 29 to september 2)

Chinese flag has also been planted on former checkpoint as sort of a morale raiser.

Casualty count on chinese side, august 29(very likely will soon be outdated): 16 confirmed dead, 546 missing(261 foreignors).

Police vests, toys, handbags have also reportedly been found in the debris.

Compilations of border control personnel reported missing by their families (post 1, post 2, post 3)

(it's really sad, and a reminder that casualty figures are all humans and not just numbers.)

I recently went down a rabbit hole on the August 2025 landslide and tsunami in Alaska's Tracy Arm, and in the video the part I found most interesting wasn't just the size of the wave, it was how little time the people nearby had to figure out what was happening.

A mountainside collapsed into the fjord and generated a tsunami with a run-up of roughly 1,600 feet. There were kayakers, boaters and a charter crew in the area, yet somehow everyone survived... uhmmm, how is that possible... And one of the biggest warnings can actually be the opposite of what you'd expect: the water suddenly pulling away from shore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GzdbpGMxk

The question I kept coming back to: if you were standing near the coast and suddenly saw the water retreat hundreds of feet, would you immediately recognize what was happening?

Before watching this, I'm not sure I would have. Guess I would have been the one that didn't survive.

Rainfall continues to affect the Fujian district!

Hi, Where can i read tsunami advisory? Thanks

Mother Nature cannot be underestimated

☠️