In the aftermath of the event a truly interdisciplinary team of researchers, from around the world but including scientists from India, self-organised to try to understand the event.\u00a0 This team drew on skills from a diverse range of fields, including earth science, social science, seismology, remote sensing and modelling, to try to piece together what happened.\u00a0 Over time the story became clear, with evidence to back up the interpretations.<\/p>\n
The group was marshalled with great skill by Dan Shugar<\/a> to produce a manuscript that documented the events.\u00a0 In a matter of days this came together – the result was published yesterday by the journal Science <\/em>(Shugar et al.<\/em> 2021<\/a>), and is available open access.<\/p>\n I don’t need to go into the detail of the sequence of events here – the abstract captures this well:<\/p>\n Our analysis of satellite imagery, seismic records, numerical model results, and eyewitness videos reveals that ~27×106<\/sup>\u00a0m3<\/sup> of rock and glacier ice collapsed from the steep north face of Ronti Peak. The rock and ice avalanche rapidly transformed into an extraordinarily large and mobile debris flow that transported boulders >20 m in diameter, and scoured the valley walls up to 220 m above the valley floor. The intersection of the hazard cascade with downvalley infrastructure resulted in a disaster, which highlights key questions about adequate monitoring and sustainable development in the Himalaya as well as other remote, high-mountain environments.<\/em><\/p>\n Figure 1 from the paper beautifully illustrates the initiating event at Chamoli:<\/p>\n Overview of the Chamoli disaster, Uttarakhand, India, from Shugar et al.<\/em> (2021)<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n .<\/p>\n As I’m an author on the paper, it is not my place to comment on its quality.\u00a0 I would like to highlight three key elements though:<\/p>\n The first is that Shugar et al.<\/em> (2021)<\/a> provides a very detailed explanation for the sequence of events at Chamoli.\u00a0 It should lay to rest any suggest that this was anything other than a landslide. There may be details that will be refined over time, but the main sequence of events is clear.<\/p>\n Second, the paper demonstrates the amazing ability of a huge team to collaborate to bring forward an understanding of the sequence, even though this event occurred in a high mountain area in winter\u00a0 in the middle of a pandemic when travel is impossible.\u00a0 The keys were enthusiasm, ability, cooperation and extremely able leadership by Dan.<\/p>\n And thirdly the event highlights the perils of building infrastructure at great cost in areas subject to these events without understanding them properly.\u00a0 Things must change is this event is not to be repeated.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n D. H. Shugar, M. Jacquemart, D. Shean, S. Bhushan, K. Upadhyay, A. Sattar, W. Schwanghart, S. Mcbride, M. Van Wyk De Vries, M. Mergili, A. Emmer, C. Deschamps-Berger, M. Mcdonnell, R. Bhambri, S. Allen, E. Berthier, J. L. Carrivick, J. J. Clague, M. Dokukin, S. A. Dunning, H. Frey, S. Gascoin, U. K. Haritashya, C. Huggel, A. K\u00e4\u00e4b, J. S. Kargel, J. L. Kavanaugh, P. Lacroix, D. Petley, S. Rupper, M. F. Azam, S. J. Cook, A. P. Dimri, M. Eriksson, D. Farinotti, J. Fiddes, K. R. Gnyawali, S. Harrison, M. Jha, M. Koppes, A. Kumar, S. Leinss, U. Majeed, S. Mal, A. Muhuri, J. Noetzli, F. Paul, I. Rashid, K. Sain, J. Steiner, F. Ugalde, C. S. Watson, M. J. Westoby. 2021.\u00a0 A massive rock and ice avalanche caused the 2021 disaster at Chamoli, Indian Himalaya<\/a>. Science<\/em>.\u00a0 DOI: 10.1126\/science.abh4455<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A massive rock and ice avalanche caused the 2021 disaster at Chamoli, Indian Himalaya: our new paper explaining the sequence of events has been published in the journal Science <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":37892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[598,608],"tags":[30614,469,5,192,17,72],"class_list":["post-37889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-processes","category-research-project","tag-chamoli","tag-featured","tag-india","tag-paper","tag-research","tag-south-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Overview](\"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/files\/2021\/06\/21_06-Chamoli-1.jpg\")
Reference<\/h4>\n