Silki on A Catastrophic Landslide Dam Outburst Flood in Nepal
My comment:
It could be that the amount of hydropower installations actually made this worse. The Himalayas are constantly getting steeper because of the magma uplift under the Tibetan plateau. Geologists have actually measured the rate of increase of steepness of those slopes and the stability of the whole situation needs the monsoon rains and the erosion they cause. Without that erosion the slopes get steeper. So with the number of hydropower installations, the erosion of the slopes has perhaps decreased? Then they get steeper and you get big "erosion events" all at once in inconvenient places, often around places where there are hydropower installations.
See Southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau stopped expanding in the late Miocene Xiaoming Shen, Jean Braun and Xiaoping Yuan (https://doi.org/10.1016j.epsl.2022.117446):
The birth and expansion of continental plateaus exert a strong control on our planet’s climate and the distribution and evolution of its biodiversity. It has been proposed that the Tibetan Plateau has been steadily growing by southward expansion. Here we demonstrate that the shape of the southeastern margin of the plateau has remained unchanged for the last 10 Myr despite vast amounts of exhumation. Our finding is based on a new, high-resolution thermochronological dataset from the deep gorges of the Salween and Mekong rivers, which we interpret using a physics-based model combined with an optimization method. We show that our scenario also agrees with a wide range of other, independent geological and geophysical data. This finding demonstrates that plateau margins can reach large-scale topographic steady-state between outward growth and surface erosion, which has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of Earth’s climate and biodiversity in the recent geological past.
See also New research reveals how Tibetan Plateau-Himalayan uplift shaped Asian summer monsoons and Influence of the Tibetan Plateau uplift on the Asian monsoon-arid environment evolution by XiaoDong Liu & BuWen Dong:
As one of the most important geological events in Cenozoic era, the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) has had profound influences on the Asian and global climate and environment evolution. During the past four decades, many scholars from China and abroad have studied climatic and environmental effects of the TP uplift by using a variety of geological records and paleoclimate numerical simulations. The existing research results enrich our understanding of the mechanisms of Asian monsoon changes and interior aridification, but so far there are still a lot of issues that need to be thought deeply and investigated further. This paper attempts to review the research on the influence of the TP uplift on the Asian monsoon-arid environment, summarize three types of numerical simulations including bulk-plateau uplift, phased uplift and sub-regional uplift, and especially to analyze regional differences in responses of climate and environment to different forms of tectonic uplifts. From previous modeling results, the land-sea distribution and the Himalayan uplift may have a large effect in the establishment and development of the South Asian monsoon. However, the formation and evolution of the monsoon in northern East Asia, the intensified dryness north of the TP and enhanced Asian dust cycle may be more closely related to the uplift of the main body, especially the northern part of the TP. In this review, we also discuss relative roles of the TP uplift and other impact factors, origins of the South Asian monsoon and East Asian monsoon, feedback effects and nonlinear responses of climatic and environmental changes to the plateau uplift. Finally, we make comparisons between numerical simulations and geological records, discuss their uncertainties, and highlight some problems worthy of further studying.
See Samaneri Jayasāra - Longchenpa ~ The Enlightened Mind ~ Dzogchen and the Wikipedia page Pratītyasamutpāda.
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