What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.
There have been maybe three such events in the 21st century (glacier or landslides producing more than a magnitude 5 quake), and none of them have happened in an area like the Himalayas. The other two were in Alaska on Mt Steller in 2005 and the Lamplugh Glacier in 2016, neither of which produced massive downstream floods.
It usually takes entire icebergs calving off to produce such seismic events and intense monsoons to create such flooding.
A black swan event is an event that is unpredictable because it is so rare.
While I'd wait for confirmation about the cause of this specific incident, the point you seem to be ignoring is that, due to climate change, events that would have been considered "black swans" historically will become more and more common, to the point that they are expected to occur.
I think that’s a misreading of the entire book. A black swan event is a rare, high-impact outlier that is nearly impossible to predict under normal circumstances, but is rationalized as having been inevitable in hindsight.
For whatever reason, you continue to try to ignore the point I'm making, which is that, in terms of natural disasters related to climate in particular, what would have been "rare, high-impact outlier[s]" are increasingly becoming common enough to be not rare and not outliers.
Maybe I misunderstand (either you or the topic in general) but I don't think what you're saying is correct. A black swan event is (to my understanding) something unexpected and generally remains so. Not (as you seem to be suggesting) "oh hey that was historically unexpected but going forward it's now considered a standard contingency".
And I have no idea where you got the "rationalized as inevitable in hindsight" thing. I've never heard of that in relation to black swan events before.
If events like these are "nearly impossible to predict", how come this post is linking to a scientific paper predicting exactly this scenario?
This flood is like The Big One in California. We know it is going to happen, it is virtually a certainty. The only question is when and where.
If glacial floods come as a surprise to you, it is only because you have been deliberately ignoring all the climate change warnings. So, a short recap: we'll see massive droughts, giant wildfires, huge floods due to rainfall, significantly more intense hurricanes, mass starvation due to large-scale crop failure, and low-lying countries drowning due to sea level rise. Oh, and add a high likelihood of the AMOC collapsing triggering a cooldown of the East Coast and Europe to the list.
Black swans are actually fairly well-populated birds that are easy to spot. So as a metaphor it works well for a common thing that smug people of limited knowledge try to claim is rare and surprising.
Anticipation is one thing, effective response in the seconds before disaster strikes is quite another thing. This might not have been an absolute black swan, but even with foresight it is challenging in the extreme to avoid risk.
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.
(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.
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
Anticipation isn't sufficient. Other than entirely abandoning such locations during all periods of high risk, loss of life is likely, and catastrophic property and infrastructure damage inevitable.
When I was researching this morning I found papers related to this kind of risk from at least 2000. Given 20 years there could have been things done I think. And there is a lot of settlement on the tops of the ranges in that area too.. Maybe the roads have to be on the river valley, but not everything else. People living there could have been offered alternative land to move out of the path of it.. monitoring and early warning could have been set up.. at the checkpoint, if it had to be there, there could have been a big evacuation tunnel carved into the hillside, or something.. I guess Nepal doesn't have a lot of resources though.
The same thing even happened a year ago in the sample place, but at a smaller size
https://www.stimson.org/2025/investigating-an-emerging-clima...
So, one of the most notably impacted locations to date has been the Gyirong port border crossing, noted in a couple of my earlier comments. Part of that is due to there being surveillance closed-circuit camera footage available, and there are other areas which would have been similarly affected. A few additional thoughts and facts have come to light:
- 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>
- 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.
Flat lowland is great because it's cheap and easy to build on, and not a hassle to actually use.
Ridgelines and slopes are terrible to build on (and often use) because there is little to no actual flat usable area without extensive construction. They also tend to be unstable and slide/erode.
That said, if I was in that area, of course i'd never build/live on anything but the highest ridgeline or slope around.
One of those 'long term/outlier risks cause daily costs' type of things. :s
I can't tell if you're parodying HN here. This is from someone's blog and is a personal reflection on his most important work of the past 10 years. Do you expect everyone to be an historian?
I expect an article titled "Ten years at Google" to talk about someone's experience at Google over the last 10 years, not a project that started in the last 5. If that's "being a historian", tell me why that's bad.
There's nothing bad about being a historian nor is there anything bad about writing about your most significant project in ten years. Both are aligned with the title.
I did similar a few years back, but for Mars DEMs, also in PDS format. At first I despised it, but yes, there is a certain pragmatism to the format. And, yeah, the best way to figure out what was going on was to just look at the files themselves.
The thing that most annoyed me at the time was there wasn't a good open source JPEG2000 decoder I could use to slice up the imagery to go along with the DEMs. But that must have changed by now...
Having read about historical radio astronomy and practiced signals analysis, I think they were a little more sophisticated than that. The recording in this format was made for easy perusal by a human, say, the next morning. I think that was the case with this signal. No doubt they wanted to revisit that spot in the sky looking at intensity, frequency shifting (Doppler), bandwidth, modulation, etc. But they never saw it again.
Historical point of interest: the Big Ear telescope that recorded this was bulldozed to make way for a golf course.
The Big Ear telescope "was larger than three football fields in size and equivalent in sensitivity to a circular dish 52.5 meters (175 feet) in diameter. The telescope consisted of a flat tiltable reflector measuring 340 feet long by 100 feet high (less when tilted), a fixed standing paraboloidal (curved) reflector which measured 360 feet long by 70 feet high, an aluminum-covered ground plane measuring 360 feet wide by 500 feet long, and two feed horns mounted on a movable assembly."
Depends on what you mean by "school" (NB the quotes in the parent comment). There is a huge variance in options for working parents of a 2-3 year old. From cramped cinder block day care -- aka The Cacophonous Petri Dish; to private nanny; to "forest schools" where kids spend as much time as possible outside digging in the dirt, climbing tree stumps, and learning how to devise and engage in large projects together (yes, a group of 2.5 year olds is capable of this).
I don't think the parent comment was talking about toddler MIT.
I do. The one I'm familiar with has large garden areas, trees for climbing/wandering around, uncultivated wilderness areas, etc. It's not a vast tract of land, but enough that it seems huge to a small person. Indoor time focuses on exploration of provocations set up by teachers, telling stories, singing, role-playing, etc.
I might be wrong, but I believe the THREDDS server the article points to (by way of https://cds.nccs.nasa.gov/nex-gddp/) supports OPeNDAP, which means you can pull subsets of the data, i.e. if you've got a 40GB file, you could slice a tiny portion of that off for downloading.
I work with the THREDDS team at Unidata. Though I still need to study this particular dataset, in general yes, the THREDDS server can do serverside subsetting of the data so that reasonably sized data is shipped over the wire.
Nice. I'm going to put this in front of our resident toddler tonight.
Bit of feedback:
* I would have been willing to put down a couple of bucks up front just to try it out, even without the extras available in-app.
* How about "toddler resistant" mode that disables the sharing, feedback, social buttons? Kids tend to touch and drag all over the place, often seemingly at random. The less they end up in a strange place and are able to figure out the core interface, the better.
Thanks for the feedback!
The monetization is hard to solve. Only thing you can do in the end is to try it out.
Thanks for the tip regarding the "toddler resistant" mode ! We'll consider that for a update.
1up that 'toddler resistant' mode; just got this for my girl's ipad, going to have lots of fun with it and it will be more fun if the music doesn't stop every five seconds because she hit the one button she wasn't supposed to hit again.
This is great. I laughed out loud when I discovered that notes you throw upward off the screen eventually come back down if you throw them straight up. Definitely getting my toddler to play with this.
I have two suggestions: one is a tool/mode that lets you remove a bunch of stuff quickly, and the other is a simple undo mechanism. Since there isn't much instruction, you need to explore by touching, and e.g. when you're testing to see if a three finger gesture does something, you tend to create a lot of unwanted notes and potentially accidentally remove stuff that you overwrite.
Oh man, I just discovered the magic of tapping on an unused instrument on the bottom. Build a sequence using no sax and then start wailing away on saxy bill. Wonderful.
For iPads able to run iOS 6+, you can activate "Guided Access" mode. Apps being run in this mode can have disabled hardware buttons and deactivate certain areas on-screen.
Once the global setting is enabled (Settings > General > Accessibility), triple-clicking the home button activates and deactivates the mode. There is a passcode, distinct from the unlock code, to exit "Guided Access."
I became familiar with this as part of an iPad kiosk project, and when my toddler discovered that iPads exist, it has been very valuable.
Of note, there is an Earth observation instrument, RapidScat, being carried in the Dragon's trunk, which will be (has been?) plucked off the capsule by operators on the ground. This one measures wind. Another, called CATS, will be similarly deployed on the outside of the ISS in December-ish; it will measure clouds and aerosols.
These are part of a collection of low-cost (well, lower than a full satellite) Earth observation instruments to take advantage of the external mount points on the ISS. NASA recently had a media briefing about this: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-hosts-media-br...
What is your definition of black swan? This paper is from 2022 and scientists have been warning about climate change for decades. It's not like this possibility wasn't anticipated. It seems likely we'll see more glacial events as the atmosphere warms.