On a Wednesday morning in late September, a wall of water, ice, and debris — moving with the force of a tsunami — erased entire villages along the Nepal-Tibet border. By Saturday, the combined missing-persons figures from Nepal and China stood at nearly 3,000, with 682 bodies recovered. Authorities in both countries warned that some of the dead may have been carried as far downstream as India, a detail that captures the almost incomprehensible scale of the destruction. The US Geological Survey attributed the catastrophe to a glacial collapse, though the precise trigger remains under investigation.

What is less contested is the broader pattern. Climate scientists have long documented that rising global temperatures are accelerating glacial melt across the Himalayas, making flash floods of this kind more probable and more severe. UN climate chief Simon Steill stated plainly that humanity's continued burning of coal, oil and gas is making such tragedies "much more likely, frequent and severe," with the communities least responsible for emissions often bearing the heaviest consequences. In Nepal's Nuwakot district, the immediate human cost was visible in its starkest form.

"All the settlements near the river were swept away," said Buddhi Ram Dangol. "There is nothing left." At a rescue hub in Bidur, relatives crowded around lists of survivors posted on army-base walls. Among them was Kalka Sharda, searching for her son, a labourer at a hydropower plant.

She could not find his name.