(TibetanReview.net, Aug21’24) – Thame (pronounced tha-mey), a small village in Nepal’s Everest region, home to many record-holding Sherpa mountaineers, including Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first person to climb Mount Everest along with explorer Edmund Hillary, was engulfed by icy flood waters after glacial lake bursts on Aug 16. The disaster displaced some 60 residents and destroyed more than a dozen houses and hotels along with a school and health clinic, reported bbc.com Aug 21.
The incident has left many of the village’s residents – around 300 people – wondering whether it is even safe to live there any longer, the report said.
Thame, along with neighbouring Thameteng (upper Thame), is a small Sherpa village in Namche VDC of the Solukhumbu District in Nepal. It is also where Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the Lawudo Lama, head of the FPMT, was born. And the Thame monastery is one of the oldest in the Khumbu region, famous for the annual Mani Rimdu festival.
While no deaths or injuries were reported, Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of Nepal Mountaineering Association, has said, “If this had happened at night time, between 200 to 300 people would have lost their lives.”
The flood has seriously affected downhill villages too. “Because of the flood some parts of our village was swept away… luckily we managed to run up the hill,” Pasang Sherpa at Tok Tok village, which is almost two days’ trek downhill from Thame, has said.
“The otherwise milky and frothy river turned so dark brown, with boulders and debris being swept down. The sound and the sight was so scary that I am still shaken. I have taken refuge in a nearby village and am thinking if I should ever go back to Tok Tok.”
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There are thousands of glaciers and glacial lakes in the Himalayas – but very few in the Everest region are monitored and have early flood warning systems installed. This is despite the fact that global warming is accelerating the melting of glaciers which can fill up the lakes to bursting point, the report noted.
A 2021 study led by the University of Leeds was stated to have found that Himalayan glaciers have lost ice ten times more quickly over the last few decades than the average rate measured since their expansion 400 to 700 years ago.
Another study published in the Nature journal in 2022 was stated to have found that Mount Everest’s South Col Glacier may have lost half its mass since the 1990’s as a result of warming.
Imja Lake below Mount Everest was drained in 2016 after officials found it was in danger of overflowing and flooding downstream settlements, trekking trails and bridges. But scientists have found that many new lakes have formed in recent years, while others have expanded and joined up to become larger ones, the report said.
Further inflaming the risk is stated to be the destabilisation of the local landscape caused by fast-retreating glaciers, leading to more landslides and avalanches that can pour into the lakes and cause them to rupture.
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Authorities were cited as saying they had listed around two dozen glacial lakes across the Nepali Himalayas as risky – but the two that burst on Aug 16 were neither mentioned in that list nor monitored by officials.
“They were the smallest ones and no one cared about them, and yet the damages have been so huge,” Ang Tshering Sherpa has said.
“Imagine what could happen if the big ones burst out. There are many of them in the Everest region.”