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At least 18 people are dead and as many as 200 are missing after a piece of a Himalayan glacier broke off Sunday ( Feb. 7 ) , activate an avalanche and dash flood that smashed through a nearby hydroelectric dekameter . A second dam , located further downstream , was also damaged by the inundation , allot to the BBC .
Videorecorded by bystandersshows the rally floodwaters surging through a jolting valley in Uttarakhand – an Indian state in the Himalayas borderingChinaand Nepal – before rip through the dam with a battering ram of rocks , mud , ice and junk .
Nanda Devi is the second-tallest mountain in India.
Many of the missing are believed to be employees who were working at the two dams , according to news reports . More than a dozen workers were rescue from a inundate tunnel on Sunday , but as many as 40 others may still be trapped in a second tunnel , the BBC reported .
splendid footage of a laborer being rescued from the deposit flood area near Tapovan tunnel area by ITBP personnel office . determine full . @IndiaToday # Uttarakhand pic.twitter.com/eGe1oYEISuFebruary 7 , 2021
The avalanche begin around 10:45 a.m. local sentence ( 12:15 a.m. EST ) Sunday , when part of the Nanda Devi glacier bankrupt off of a high peak and plummeted into the river below . The glacier sit atop a mountain of the same name ; soaring more than 25,600 feet ( 7,800 meter ) high , Nanda Devi is the secondly - tallest mountain in India . ( At a dizzying 28,160 foot , or 8,580 m , Kangchenjunga , which sit down on the edge with Nepal , isthe magniloquent mountainin India and the third marvellous in the reality . )
Indian authorities are still look into the cause of the avalanche . However , the Himalayan glacier of Uttarakhand are live to be highly fragile , andclimate changehas importantly accelerated their melt rate . A 2019 study in the journalScience Advancescalculated that the average pace of ice loss in the Himalayas doubled between 1975 and 2016 , while theHindu Kush Himalaya Assessmentreport predicted that one - third of the region ’s glaciers could be decease by the end of the century , even if the human race ’s most challenging clime targets are meet .
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Environmentalists have long caution against major substructure task in the thin region , harmonize to NPR . Uttarakhand have an even greater tragedy in 2013 , when record monsoon rain trigger off overflow that kill roughly 6,000 people . The catastrophe , which has been called the " Himalayan tsunami , " wiped countless villages , bridges and route off the map .
Originally issue on Live Science .
