‘Summer has shaken us’: Nepal’s flood disaster hits close to home in the shadow of melting Mont Blanc

Copyright AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani

By Angela Symons with AP

Published on 10/09/2026 -  EURONEWS

A Chamonix local official says his town urgently needs to prepare for the dangers of falling chunks of glacier or rock.

For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities have gazed upon the seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave Western Europe's highest peak its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.

But climate warming is dismantling the picture at alarming speed.

Europe's record heatwaves this summer savaged permafrost that for millennia has acted like glue on the Alpine landscape. Defrosting cliffs came apart, sending rock falls cascading from the heights. A famously dangerous gully that climbers have long braved on ascents to the summit, 4,805 metres up, became temporarily impassable.

“We weep for our mountain, the way it's changing. It hits us in the gut,” says Stéphane Bozon, a deputy mayor in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, a French town at the foot of the giant that straddles France's border with Italy.

Tarpaulins cover the ice cave of the 'Mer de Glace' glacier to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani

“From mid-July onward, we saw an increase in rock falls. We saw areas becoming difficult to access because of glacial retreat and snowmelt on the glaciers, with crevasses opening up and rock collapses making some areas difficult to reach or traverse,” he says.

Each degree of warming can have an outsized impact. On the Aiguille du Midi peak, which rises to an altitude of 3,842 metres in the Mont Blanc range, average temperatures for July have soared. From a chilly 1.6°C in 1994, the monthly average for this July was the warmest ever recorded, at 3.3°C, says Meteo France, the national weather service.

“The mountain really dried out, with temperatures unlike any I had ever experienced,” Bozon says.

Relate

The Himalayan flood disaster hits close to home in the Alps

In the wake of devastating floods in the Himalayas, news agency The Associated Press talked to researchers, climbers and residents coping with the risks and uncertainties of climate change on Mont Blanc.

The floods that swept through Nepal and China on 26 August were triggered after a collapse of bedrock and glacier ice sent debris and water surging through multiple Himalayan rivers. Initial assessments of many scientists are that climate change played a key role in creating conditions for the catastrophe.

As Earth’s global average temperature rises because of the burning of oil, gas and coal, the chances of such disasters increase.

In the Alps, glaciers once admired for their icy majesty are being eyed with trepidation as they shrink and lose stability.

People look at the 'Mer de Glace' glacier as tarpaulins cover the ice cave to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani

Bozon, who is in charge of safety for Chamonix, says his town urgently needs to prepare for “serious scenarios” of chunks of glacier or mountain potentially falling onto inhabited areas.

“We have to move quite quickly because this summer has shaken us and year after year we’re being shaken by the glaciers’ retreat,” he says.

In Italy, researchers are also documenting dramatic damage wrought by heat on glaciers this year. In Lombardy, Alpine glaciers have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the region's glacier service.

“While it used to snow at high altitudes in the past, now it rains,” says Vanda Bonardo, head of the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, a nongovernmental organisation.

“So we’ve also seen the effects on the stability of the terrain,” she says.

Relat

Rock falls in the Mont Blanc area have surged

Permafrost that has held Alpine peaks in its icy grip for thousands of years acts as a cement, helping to hold their steep rock faces together. It took a beating from the succession of heatwaves.

“That doesn't mean that all the rock faces will collapse in the coming years or decades but quite a number of them are on the verge of becoming unstable and remain stable today only because of the presence of that ice,” says Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University who specialises in climate change's impact on mountain snows, glaciers and frosts. "As the ice changes, we have seen a huge, huge number of rock falls and rock collapses this year."

A collapse is a major fall involving more than 100 cubic metres of rock – more than enough to fill a large shipping container. Ravanel expects this year's tally of collapses in the Mont Blanc massif “will probably reach around 400”. He says that is about 10 times more than two decades ago.

The last time things got close to this bad was the ’’catastrophic year″ of 2022, he says, with nearly 300 collapses.

“This has really been one of the defining features of the summer of 2026,” he says.

The Mont-Blanc massif mountains are seen from the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani

A Mont Blanc climbing guide juggles the risks

Chamonix-based mountain guide Stuart MacDonald says it shocks him to see how rapidly and extensively glaciers that hang from the flanks of the Mont Blanc massif are retreating.

When he guides people up the peaks, he points them to “where the glacier was last year and this is where it was 10 years ago. And that usually has quite an effect”.

Melting and the risk of rock falls made his job “pretty challenging” this summer and forced him to cancel plans to lead a group to Mont Blanc's summit last week.

“You hear it before you see it and then you’ll turn round and you’ll just see an enormous cascade of rocks coming down a slope and it can be quite terrifying,” MacDonald says.

“What’s most scary is that sometimes these rocks are falling on routes that we used to be climbing at this time of year,” he adds. “It can be depressing sometimes when you look at something that you maybe climbed in July or August in the past and you see that it’s absolutely impossible to do it now.”

New study raises concerns about climate feedback loop as melting Arctic glaciers flush ancient methane from rocks beneath the ice

The more glaciers melt, the more methane they are likely to release

iC3 Polar Research Hub

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Conducting a radar survey on a Svalbard glacier during winter

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Credit: Gabrielle Kleber

Meltwater rivers flowing from Svalbard glaciers are carrying ancient methane from rocks beneath the ice into the open air, new research shows.

The findings reveal a natural feedback loop that may worsen as the Arctic continues to get warmer. Melting glaciers can open hidden pathways for methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Put simply, the more glaciers melt, the more methane they are likely to release.

Methane in the rocks

The study was led by Gabrielle Kleber, a researcher with the iC3 Polar Research Hub in Tromsø, Norway. Her team sampled rivers draining valley glaciers across central Svalbard. They found methane in every river they tested.

The study team took 148 water samples from 19 glacier-fed rivers in central Svalbard, providing by far the most extensive assessment yet of methane in glacier meltwater in the region. Every river in their survey contained more methane than expected from contact with the atmosphere, with the highest values reaching up to 425 times that level.

Co-author Silje Waaler says the team deliberately designed the survey to capture the diversity of glaciers across the region.

“We wanted to study many different glaciers, across a range of rock types and ice conditions. That gave us a clearer picture of why some glacier rivers carry more methane than others,” she says.

A key finding is that this methane is mostly not being made by microbes under the ice, as has been observed beneath glaciers in Greenland.

Instead, it appears to come from Svalbard’s geology. Many parts of the archipelago contain old shale layers rich in organic carbon. Over millions of years, heat and pressure can turn this material into methane and other gases.

They also analysed the carbon in the methane to identify its source. In some samples, they measured related gases, including ethane and propane, which helped confirm that much of the methane came from geological sources.

“These glaciers are mostly melting on their surfaces,” Gabrielle says. “But this meltwater finds its way to the bottom of the glaciers through crevasses and holes. This means that it interacts with the rocks underneath, and where those rocks contain ancient gas, the water can flush methane out into rivers.”

The most methane-rich waters came from glaciers resting on shale-bearing rock formations. But geology alone did not explain everything.

The team also found that the physical state of the glacier bed matters. Glaciers with thawed, wet and active beds were far better at picking up methane. Glaciers frozen to their beds were less connected to the rocks below, even when methane-rich geology was present.

A map of where methane can escape

To understand these processes, the researchers combined river chemistry with ice surveys. They used ground-penetrating radar to map ice conditions within selected glaciers. This allowed them to estimate how much of each glacier bed was thawed and able to carry water.

Co-author Leonard Magerl says that this combination was crucial.

“The temperature at the base of glaciers is an important piece of the puzzle,” Leonard says. “We found that the biggest methane releases happened where the right rocks and the right glacier conditions came together. This insight can help to estimate emissions from other ice-covered regions.”

The researchers estimate that land-terminating glaciers across Svalbard may transport roughly 182 to 368 tonnes of methane per year in meltwater, depending on how the estimate is scaled. This is in addition to previous, much higher estimates for methane released by groundwater springs in front of glaciers. But it still points to a widespread and undercounted pathway for ancient carbon to reach the atmosphere.

Why this matters

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. While this study focuses on Svalbard, similar methane-release pathways likely occur in other glaciated regions where ice overlies organic-rich rocks or sediments. These include large parts of the Arctic, the Himalayas and Antarctica.

Gabrielle explains that: “The amounts reported here are small compared with human-caused emissions from fossil fuels, farming and waste. But they matter because they reveal a natural feedback loop that is not confined to Svalbard, and that may grow as the Arctic warms.”

As glaciers thin and retreat, more meltwater may reach their beds. This can increase contact with fractured rock, sediment and groundwater. In some places, that may flush out more methane.

However, the story is not simple. Some Svalbard glaciers are also becoming colder at their beds as they shrink. If a glacier becomes frozen to its bed, its ability to flush methane through subglacial rivers may fall.

“Our results show that future methane release will depend on both geology and glacier change,” Gabrielle says. “That makes it important to know what lies beneath the ice, not only how fast the ice is melting.”

Links to previous research

The new study builds directly on previous iC3 work on methane around retreating Svalbard glaciers. Gabrielle Kleber and Leonard Magerl have previously found that meltwater from one Svalbard glacier could carry geologic methane from beneath the ice, making it release more methane per area than Greenland glaciers. Meanwhile, newly uncovered groundwater springs are also releasing the potent greenhouse gas in Svalbard forefields, demonstrating the many understudied sources of methane in these environments.

The new study, published in Nature Communications today, takes the next step. It shows that methane-rich meltwater is not unique to one glacier. It is widespread across central Svalbard, but strongest where shale-rich geology and thawed glacier beds overlap.

Find out more

The study, “Subglacial geology and thermal conditions regulate methane emissions from Svalbard glaciers”, is published open access in Nature Communications today.

Lead researcher Dr Gabrielle Kleber and co-authors Leonard Magerl and Silje Waaler work at the iC3 Polar Research Hub, which is hosted by the Department of Geosciences of UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Gabrielle studies Arctic methane emissions and glacial hydrology. Leonard works on glacier biogeochemistry and cryosphere processes. Silje studies how material released from glaciers affects downstream ecosystems.

 

Researcher hiking to the next sampling site on Svalbard

Credit

Gabrielle Kleber

 

Dr Gabrielle Kleber taking Svalbard water samples

Credit

Erik Mannerfelt

 

Researcher hiking to the next sampling site on Svalbard

Credit

Gabrielle Kleber

River flowing out of the bottom of a melting Svalbard glacier (IMAGE)

iC3 Polar Research Hub

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River flowing out of the bottom of a melting Svalbard glacier

Credit

Leonard Magerl

 

Taking hydrochemical measurements of a glacial river on Svalbard

Credit

Gabrielle Kleber

 

Taking water samples from a glacial river on Svalbard

Credit

Gabrielle Kleber

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-77190-z 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Subglacial geology and thermal conditions regulate methane emissions from Svalbard glaciers

Article Publication Date

8-Sep-2026

The disaster in Nepal and the need to build resilience: An ecosocialist energy transition perspective

By Partido Lakas ng Masa

Published 7 September, 2026

[Editor’s note: Filipino socialist activist Khyl Ramos, from the Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM, Party of the Labouring Masses), will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

Nepal and the Philippines share a fundamental climate condition: both are low greenhouse-gas emitters yet highly exposed to climate risks and suffer from climate disasters created by the rich countries of the Global North. In 2024, Nepal and the Philippines emitted only 0.63 and 1.51 tons of greenhouse gases per person, respectively, compared with more than 14 tons per person in the United States and Australia.

Global warming is a major driver of increasing glacier retreat and ice loss, contributing to greater melting and floods risk in the Himalayas. Warming alters the glacier–lake–mountain system in ways that make certain catastrophic events more likely. This is now a demonstrable pattern.

The chain is roughly: Global warming → glacier retreat and ice loss → more and larger glacial lakes → unstable ice, rock and moraine slopes → sudden collapse or overtopping → glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF) and flash flood → downstream destruction.

The most immediately vulnerable Hindu-Kush Himalayan countries, apart from China and India, include Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan, all with very low levels of emissions. The scale of the disaster, which spread across borders, demonstrates the stark reality of the existential climate emergency.

The disaster in Nepal’s Rasuwa District and other affected areas exposed entire communities, hydropower and border-trade workers, security personnel and downstream populations to severe and rapidly cascading risks. Nepal’s government, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), security forces, medical teams and emergency services mobilised search, rescue and evacuation operations and worked to restore roads, bridges, electricity, telecommunications and water services.

But the speed of the event, the narrow Himalayan valleys and communications failures left little time for warning or evacuation. Timure and Rasuwagadhi were severely affected, while transport, power, communications and Nepal–China trade were disrupted. Beyond the immediate destruction, displacement and prolonged disruption to hydropower, tourism, transport and local livelihoods will produce wider social and economic consequences.

The growing danger of cascading high-mountain hazards

The disaster in Nepal’s Bhotekoshi–Trishuli corridor reveals the growing danger of cascading high-mountain hazards. Ice or rock failures can trigger landslides and debris flows, block rivers, generate sudden surges or outburst floods and devastate downstream communities within hours. Cryospheric, geological and hydrological hazards can combine rapidly and cross national borders.

This exposes a deeper problem: resilience cannot mean simply responding more effectively after infrastructure fails. We must ask why communities and critical infrastructure are increasingly concentrated in landscapes exposed to interconnected and difficult-to-predict hazards.

Beyond individual infrastructure projects

Official assessments show that this was not a collection of isolated hydropower failures. The Ministry of Energy initially placed about 754 MW of generation capacity within the affected or damage zone.

Subsequent assessments identified around 431 MW of generation as lost or disconnected. According to preliminary reports from the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), 431 MW of operating generation across 12 projects was immediately affected, including 406.1 MW of hydropower and a 25 MW solar plant. Fifteen hydropower projects under construction, with a combined capacity of about 470 MW, also sustained damage.

The affected system included generation facilities, substations, transmission infrastructure, roads and construction sites across the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli corridor. These included Rasuwagadhi, Chilime, Upper Trishuli 3A, Trishuli, Devighat, Sanjen Khola, Sanjen, Mailung Khola, Salasungi Sanjen and Langtang Khola, as well as the 25 MW solar plant and strategically important 220 kV Nuwakot substation.

This challenges conventional project-by-project infrastructure planning. Projects are usually assessed by installed capacity, financial returns, construction costs and electricity output. But the real risk is systemic:

What happens when multiple power projects, transmission corridors, roads, settlements and communities are exposed to the same cascading hazard?

The cumulative impact of development

The Himalayas and their river systems are shared ecological and social systems, not simply collections of sites for competing infrastructure projects. The key question is therefore not only how many megawatts a river or valley can generate, but what cumulative risks development creates across an entire river basin.

Hydropower depends on transmission networks, roads, bridges, communications and access routes; communities and economic activity depend on the same corridors. When one hazard strikes, these systems can fail together.

Damage to one component can disable others, while disrupted transport and communications can prevent emergency services and workers from reaching affected areas. The result is cascading infrastructure vulnerability — the overall failure can be far greater than the sum of individual project failures.

This changes the question of reconstruction. With preliminary national reconstruction requirements estimated at US$4–5 billion, and energy among the major infrastructure losses, resilience cannot mean simply rebuilding what existed before. Reconstruction must reconsider where, how and at what scale infrastructure is built.

From downstream response to source-to-downstream risk management

The disaster also exposes the limits of conventional rainfall-based flood warnings. Risk management must cover the entire hazard chain — from high-mountain sources to downstream settlements.

This requires transboundary monitoring and data sharing on glaciers, snow and ice, landslides, avalanches, seismic activity, river blockages and river conditions. Early-warning systems must integrate cryospheric, seismic, geomorphological and hydrological indicators rather than treating floods as isolated rainfall events.

It also requires anticipatory evacuation: clear triggers, safe areas, evacuation routes, community drills, sirens and redundant communications. Infrastructure and land-use planning must anticipate cascading hazards through alternative access routes, backup power and communications.

Community-based early-warning experience across the Hindu Kush Himalaya is crucial. Information alone does not save lives; communities must be able to interpret warnings and act on them. Real-time risk information must reach local decision-makers and communities in a form they can understand and use.

Observation by ICIMOD specialists after the Lhende Khola event reinforce this point: a cryosphere hazard can become a catastrophic settlement flood within hours. As the pace of cryospheric change accelerates, national institutions acting separately will struggle to keep up. Regional cooperation is therefore not optional but increasingly necessary.

Resilience requires regional planning

Nepal cannot address these risks alone. Himalayan river systems and hazards cross Nepal, Tibet/China, Bhutan, India and other states. Institutions such as SAARC and ICIMOD, together with other regional mechanisms, can provide foundations for cooperation — but their orientation must shift from fragmented development toward collective resilience and ecological sustainability.

This is not merely a technical question. It is political. Development is largely organised through competing national agendas, corporate investment and individual projects. Each project may appear rational in isolation while collectively increasing ecological risk and concentrating communities and critical infrastructure in vulnerable landscapes.

The alternative is democratic regional planning that meets social needs within ecological limits, directs public investment toward these goals, and ensures an equitable distribution of benefits and risks.

This principle has major implications for the energy transition. The objective cannot simply be to replace fossil-fuel electricity with more renewable megawatts. Renewable infrastructure can also reproduce concentrated vulnerability when built in exposed landscapes without basin-wide risk assessment.

Energy planning must therefore compare large projects with alternatives such as distributed solar, storage, microgrids and smaller-scale community energy. A resilient renewable-energy system should decentralise where appropriate, use robust interconnected networks, incorporate storage and microgrids, and be designed around community needs and participation.

Above all, it must reduce concentrated risk. If one valley, transmission corridor or substation carries a large share of regional generation, a single disaster can produce system-wide consequences.

The central question is not simply, “How much renewable energy can we build?” It is: What kind of energy system can meet social needs, remain within ecological limits and withstand cascading climate and geological hazards?

An ecosocialist approach to resilience

The lesson from Nepal extends across the Asia-Pacific. Climate disasters do not respect national borders, yet political responses remain overwhelmingly organised within them. Glacial instability, landslides, debris flows, river surges and flooding in the Himalayas illustrate a wider regional reality: typhoons, floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and sea-level rise increasingly affect interconnected communities and economies across borders.

Yet governments continue to compete for investment, energy resources, strategic infrastructure, supply chains and markets even when the ecological systems on which they depend are transboundary. Rivers, coastlines, fisheries, forests, glaciers, atmospheric systems and electricity networks cannot be governed effectively as isolated national assets. Infrastructure built upstream or in vulnerable coastal and mountain regions can transfer risks far beyond project and national boundaries.

The contradiction becomes sharper as governments expand military spending and prepare for geopolitical conflict. Enormous public resources are being directed toward weapons, military infrastructure and strategic competition precisely when societies urgently need investment in climate adaptation, disaster preparedness, resilient infrastructure, public health, food and water security, and just energy transitions.

This points to a different conception of security: human and ecological security rather than military security.

Regional cooperation should prioritise shared disaster-risk monitoring, early-warning systems, transboundary river-basin governance, climate-resilient infrastructure, regional energy cooperation, emergency response capacity and protection of vulnerable communities.

Resilience therefore requires democratic public planning at local, national and regional levels, linking the energy transition with ecological protection, disaster resilience, decent livelihoods and social ownership. It means placing social need before private returns, ecological limits before endless infrastructure expansion, regional cooperation before competitive development, and public investment before speculative finance.

A genuinely just energy transition is more than changing the technology used to generate electricity. It requires transforming how energy, infrastructure and natural resources are planned, financed, owned and governed. The goal is a socially just, ecologically sustainable and resilient energy system — and a regional model of sustainable and sovereign industrialisation.

The Nepal disaster makes the choice immediate. We must move from fragmented projects to interconnected systems; from downstream response to source-to-downstream risk management; from national competition to regional cooperation; from private accumulation to public investment; and from market-driven development to democratic planning based on social need and ecological limits.

The objective is not merely to protect infrastructure from disaster. It is to build societies that are less vulnerable to disaster in the first place.