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Comment by ronzensci | Hacker News Reader

Nepal-Tibet floods, which has killed more than 200 people on Aug 26, is neither a Cloud Burst nor a Flash Flood. It is a Glacier melt related flood.

63,000+ Glaciers are now being tracked. 766 Glacier Lake Outburst Floods are analysed.

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There are 100k glaciers and lakes tracked on that site. From what I can tell this is just a catalog. There seems to be no active data nor any kind of threat assessment. How can you conclude that this catalog makes this disaster avoidable?

I can think of two ways two ways of preventing this catastrophe or at least saving lives:

1. getting the world on reducing carbon dioxide at least from the 70s on worldwide. This also could have saved some lives in the middle east.

2. Use the list as an start for monitoring the glaciers and alerting the people for evacuation with an regular test of all alarming systems, but this also would have taken years to implement.

I think #2 would be a great business idea for some smart people to aggregate some satellite imagery with AI and you could create such a thing to monitor the glaciers and maybe lead to some predictive aspect which could aid an early warning system.

I think #1 requires a LOT more nuance than carbon levels.

Monitoring requires more than Satellite images. It requires sensors to measure the speed, snowfall/rainfall, how mich water melts, ...

Yes. Agreed. That is what this portal is designed to enable.

I completely agree. I'm just asking if I missed something as a catalog of glaciers with monitoring data or threat assessment does not suggest preventable deaths to me. Unless of course I am missing these features on that site.

This catalog is meant to assist in identifying which Glaciers need ground level monitoring. Community involvement is essential in analysing and parsing the catalog on this site.

This was launched a week before the Nepal floods.

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