dredmorbius

<https://english.news.cn/20260827/a8eb0a7aedb34d9181793f5fbc0...>

Otherwise China report 3 dead and 558 missing, not clear if at the port itself or the surrounding county, or how accurate counts of those present at the port might be.

The events, even with increased frequency, are relatively rare (perhaps a few times a decade), quite sudden, utterly overwhelming, and destructive to virtually everything in their path.

The only assured safety practice would be to keep out of the danger zone entirely, and even this is challenging:

- There's very little habitable or arable land, and much of that is in river valleys (e.g., in the heart of the risk zone).

- Many mountainous regions are poor, and Nepal particularly so. Governmental and institutional resources are highly constrained, corruption, opportunism, and risk-taking behaviours are common.

- It's not possible to construct around the risks, as even the most robust structures are utterly demolished. Post-incident imagery shows bare land scrubbed clean near Gyirong Port, for example. Underground shelter might be possible. But ...

- Response times are on the order of seconds to minutes. The elapsed time from the glacial collapse (captured by seismometers) to the debris wall striking Gyirong Port was roughly seven minutes. That's about as much time as would be necessary to climb to a safe(r) elevation or enter an underground shelter. Even then, survivors would have to wait to be dug out, potentially days or weeks later.

- Flood run-ups of as high as 800m (2,6000 ft) were reported within 7-8 km of the start of the incident. Even further down the river valley flood depths hit 9m (27 ft) within 30 minutes. Depending on local topography it would be necessary to move a considerable horizontal distance to reach a safe vertical elevation. Though there's an inverse relation between narrowness of a channel and the direct kinetic risk, in the case of this event, even a fairly broad floodplain would have presented considerable risk, and refuge structures would have to be exceptionally robust to survive and provide protection.

Monitoring of potential risks, advanced warning (that is, of a potential situation rather than a current one), and evacuation of the affected area would be necessary.

Anything constructed within the risk area would have to be seen as a sacrifice zone. Ironically the Gyirong Port was substantially rebuilt this past January following similar, though lesser floods about a year ago which wiped out the Friendship Bridge between China and Nepal. Infrastructure such as roads and bridges might be elevated above river level, but would otherwise have to be rebuilt following events.

Advance warnings are disruptive and often turn out not to reflect a manifest threat. With time, public and business response tends to be to deprecate and ignore such warnings. The region has a literacy rate below 70%, as well as being both an international trade route and tourist region, further complicating communications, awareness, and compliance with emergency preparation and response efforts.

This isn't to say that nothing can be done, but there are no easy choices, and local poverty will make even modest efforts challenging.

- The site captured in the video, the Gyirong Port border crossing between China and Nepal, was struck by the flood roughly seven minutes after the presumed avalanche thought to have triggered the event.

- Flood inundation is seen up to 800 m (2,600 ft) above river level, and the camera position in the video at approximately 20--25m (roughly 6--8 stories) above ground level was engaged in the debris flow.

- It would take a fit person 4--8 minutes to climb even 250m or so above ground level, presuming instant notification and a clear evacuation path. Even with an instant warning of upstream conditions survival was overwhelmingly unlikely.

- Subsequent footage appears to show complete obliteration off all structures, with no trace remaining. This is based on preliminary imagery, without precise location information, and in a landscape changed beyond all recognition.

- Astoundingly, two survivors from the Port are mentioned in Wikipedia presently.

Though yes, one of the peculiarities of flood risk is that elevation equals safety. That's modulo a number of other factors though.

In particular, with an event of this magnitude, wind blast is a major effect. Toward the end of one video a line of buses in a car park is seen shifting backward, I suspect due to wind. These can reach well above hurricane force, and of course carries its own debris and threats, where even grass and straw can penetrate deeply. There's also the risk of secondary landslides and the like in steep terrain. One of the regions affected by this event has an etymology from "mud wall", which may be a reference to the geology of the canyon walls themselves. Those could easily be unstable.

Best option is to be lucky and not be there when things go horribly wrong.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz>

<https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08954>

<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00335...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis>

"Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law" <https://www.npr.org/2024/05/17/1252012825/florida-gov-desant...> (2024)

"North Carolina Literally Passed Laws Against Science on Sea-Level Rises" <https://www.sciencealert.com/you-can-t-outlaw-hurricanes-how...> (2018)

- The crossing was substantially renovated in January of this year following an earlier flood which washed out the bridge connecting the station (in China) to Nepal.

- The crossing, part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative>), by needs must sit on the principal highway through the region. Which ... follows the river valley. Now, it's possible for that highway to be raised substantially off the valley floor, but consider that "inundations reached heights of 800m (2,600 ft) in a valley some 7km (4.3 mi) from the origin" (<https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260827_22/>, via Wikipedia).

- The inundation reached the Gyirong port seven minutes after the initial avalanche. Even with absolutely timely warnings, that is only just barely enough time for a fit person to reach a safe elevation above the port itself. Wikipedia now mentions two people (of apparently hundreds present) being rescued from Gyirong port.

- Early reconnaissance footage above the site of the former Gyirong port shows nothing but bare land. All of the apparently quite substantial structures on the site were simply scrubbed from existence. The forces involved are formidable. <https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1369215.shtml>

I believe that the end of this video shows post-incident video of the same site, though frankly it's unrecognisable. I'm sure we'll have more definitive evidence soon. <https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/other/china-video-shows-muds...>.

- The event is, as has been noted, foreseable, but also unprecedented. There are no events of comparable magnitude in the area, despite previous flooding. The likelihood that this week's incident represents a potential new baseline must be considered.

- Debris flows were moving at roughly 50m/s, or 180 kph (about 110 mph). That's not only an absolutely formidable speed, but a formidable force, where kinetic energy = mass * velocity squared.

The only possible safe refuge I could see would be some sort of underground bunker, into which all staff and travelers would have to locate to in a matter of seconds, and then sealed against water intake, this in a busy border crossing with multiple nationalities and languages in a region with a < 70% literacy rate.

And that's for the Gyirong border station itself. Note that that was a Chinese facility, where China is the vastly wealthier and better-resourced partner to Nepal. Nepal's capabilities to effect similar measures at an equivalent facility or in numerous communities throughout the region is quite limited.

Also affected were numerous other facilities, including a shrine (being visited by numerous Hindu pilgrims), apparently utterly destroyed and all present killed, numerous villages, etc. Roads are heavily damaged if present at all, bridges are washed away, and in a region with tens to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants (based on various county/district Wikipedia pages I've examined), a dozen or so rescue helicopters have so far been summoned.

Oh, and a new glacial/debris dam and lake have formed which is feared may pose an additional outburst flood event within days (<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/nepal-tibet-fl...>).

I've been reviewing what coverage I can find of the present event in Nepal/China, in context with Section 5.1, "Comprehensive approach to disaster risk management", of TFA.

It seems that what would be required would be:

- Active surveillance of glacial lake formation.

- Active mitigation of glacial lakes, reducing risk.

- Warning and response infrastructure, procedures, and protocols along the likly flood path.

From video of what I presume are among the worst-hit areas (see: <https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>), there appear to have been at best a few seconds of warning. Very robust structures are demolished virtually instantly. Even had people been sheltering within those structures, or headed up-slope above the water flow, either structural integrity would prove insufficient, or response time inadequate to reach a safe elevation above the debris flow. The latter problem is compounded by what appears to be an extraordinarily strong air blast (likely hurricane-strength or greater) as well as massive amounts of airborne debris, much of it rock.

Terrain is severely constrained in the region, and the only buildable regions are in river valleys themselves. The Gyirong Port border crossing is located deep within a river channel, and despite robust construction simply could not survive the event.

See:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyirong_Port> (Wikipedia article on the port.)

Map / satellite view: <https://www.google.com/maps/@28.2792579,85.3752907,1341m/dat...>

(Take a few minutes to examine the region around the port itself ... there are several communities and businesses all well within the disaster zone, and I suspect that obliteration to those matches or exceeds what was captured on video at the crossing itself.)

From the first video at this Twitter post, a camera situated roughly 20m above the base terrain did not survive the event (though it transmitted for roughly a minute).

A second camera (I believe near the same location) shows similarly catastrophic damage, and no chance for anyone at base level to climb to a safe elevation before being overtaken by the debris flow.

Wikipedia notes "Floodwaters reached settlements as high as 270 feet (80 m) above the river level", citing <https://english.onlinekhabar.com/rasuwa-flood-in-pictures.ht...>.

Climbing that far would require 4--8 minutes for even a highly-fit person. Available response time in the videos I've seen is on the order of 1--2 minutes. Anyone beginning within the debris zone is already walking dead.

As the Cowboy Junkies said:

  But if there's on thing in my life
  That these years have taught
  It's that you can always see it coming
  But you can never stop it

<https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092542957060841592>

The video footage already starting to emerge is absolutely horrific. The Wikipedia article currently features a longer version of the Gyirong border crossing video, in which a wall of water utterly engulfs a five or six story very substantial concrete structure, and what appear to be hundreds of people on the ground.

Climate change is real, and here, people.

By pointing out both the necessity of the transition and the historically slow pace of such transitions, Smil is raising the pressure on achieving such a transition rather than encouraging complaisance and/or excessive tolerance of the rate of change to date.

And despite the current pace of change, we're still far from goals with impacts of failure to move off fossil fuels ever more evident.

There are also multiple types of diabetes, not just the generally-known Type I / II split, but gestational (affecting pregnant women), Type 5, malnutrition-related, and others. (See Wikipedia for a listing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes#Types>.)

Other factors can also influence blood sugars, including infections, physical activity, and stress.

People tend to add single or double cream (1/2 & 1/2 or whipping / heavy cream, respectively, in the US) to coffee, both of which have less carbohydrate, and generally add a tablespoon or two (15--30 ml) per cup of coffee. The carbohydrate content is < 2g.

That's unlikely to bring someone out of a ketosis state, which requires a daily intake of < 15--30g. That's about two full cups (450 ml) of single cream.

All objects within a given radius of the black hole (possibly modulo spin) would experience the same time dilation. Remote objects in the universe would not experience the dilation.

From the perspective of the astronaut falling toward the singularity, the rest of the Universe would age at an ever-increasing rate.

From the perspective of a remote observer, the astronaut falling toward the singularity would be experiencing time at an ever-decreasing rate.

The notion of relativity is that time-perception is relative, and dependent on acceleration, whether from motion (as on a spaceship) or from gravitational acceleration (as near a black hole). Objects in orbit around Earth, further from Earth's centre, and hence subject to reduced gravitational acceleration, age more quickly than objects on Earth's surface. This is actually measurable using atomic clocks, though the effect is quite small. It is sufficient that GPS satellites require time correction.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace#ES-30>

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...>

Articles are a fuzzier area AFAIU:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887149>

(Not a mod myself, though I watch mod actions fairly closely.)

CBP: Customs & Border Protection

<https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/originating-underwriting/...>

HN mods may wish to take notice.

G+ comes to mind.

(Several billion profiles, tens of millions active. Shut down 1 Apr 2019. Yes, April Fools' Day.)

Both have seen repeated attempts at repeal by the GOP and present US Administration, and effective status rescinded.

The GOP has embraced the historical Democratic position with enthusiasm. The Democratic party has stood for civil rights since the 1960s, with former segregationists and white nationalists first joining, then taking over, the GOP. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402261>.

Attempting to resurrect long-dead, long-irrelevant, and now fully-reversed political descriptions can be taken as a prima facie declaration of bad faith.

Do better please.

"Please use open source systems whenever possible so you can review the source code."

<https://floss.social/@mikebabcock/117134334377276076>

(Much as I'd prefer the Beeb to the Torygraph.)

  The time they'd lost in suing
  In chasing and pursing
  The boldest lies
  Of Linux scries
  Has been SCO Group's undoing.

By 1) relying on such labour and 2) denying either lawful entry or any plausible path to permanent status for the vast majority of these workers and their families, not to mention many, many, many broken promises along the way (asylum, DREAM Act, don't get me started on Native American treaties), the U.S. has de facto maintained a legally-underprivileged and disadvantaged working class long after the statutory prohibition of (most) slavery and indentured servitude.

Yes, there are also economic and political circumstances within the US geopolitical orbit which encourage inward migration. That too cannot be separated from long-standing U.S. foreign, economic, and military policies within the region.