The lessons of Langtang
Ten years after an earthquake swept a Himalayan village off the face of the Earth, we now know that climate change made it much more deadly.
Every year around this time I find myself thinking about Langtang, a village in northern Nepal. And about a child who lived there.
On April 25, 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal. The quake killed nearly 9,000 people across the country, including twenty-two on Mt. Everest — the deadliest day ever on the world’s highest mountain.
But the people of Langtang suffered the most.
Just before noon, a seven-foot-thick mass of snow, ice and rock was shaken loose from the face of Langtang Lirung, the 23,734-foot mountain that looms over the valley. As it fell, that avalanche pushed the air ahead of it with cataclysmic force.
Twelve thousand feet below, the people of Langtang were enjoying a leisurely late Saturday morning. Some had been up late the night before, attending a ceremony at a local monastery to mark the reincarnation of a recently deceased elder.
The shock wave generated by the falling debris hit them long before any of the mountain’s pieces did. The blast of air pancaked the thick-walled stone buildings of Langtang and nearby villages. It flattened entire forests across the valley and stripped the trees of their bark and limbs.
Many of those who were caught outside were flung through the air by 200-mph winds. Those indoors were buried under their own collapsed homes.
In 2011, I spent a glorious week trekking through the Langtang Valley while researching my first book (which was all about climate change, glacier retreat and endangered Himalayan villages).
On my way up the valley, I met an older man coming down the trail. He seemed distraught. He told me that he ran a guest house nearby and asked me where I was from.
“America,” I replied.
His face brightened for a moment. Did I know a place called Tennessee?
“Yes.”
“How far from your home?”
About two days drive, I told him. “America’s a big place.”
He winced at this, as though I had struck him. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a fraying piece of folded paper and handed it to me. On it was written a name, a phone number, an email address. “He is an American,” the man said.
He explained that the American had been trekking through the mountains and stayed at the man’s guest house for three months. He had taken up with the man’s daughter. She became pregnant. Her baby girl had been born the day before. The American had promised to return. But they had received no word from him for three months.
The man kept rubbing his face as he spoke. He explained that he was walking down valley to catch a bus to Kathmandu, where he planned to try the number and the email address of the absent father one more time. He clearly had little hope of reaching him.
“Maybe he’ll call you,” I said, lamely. “Maybe he’ll come back to be with your daughter.”
“I don’t think so,” the man said, staring down at the ground. “Now her life is finished.”
I assumed he was referring to the social opprobrium his daughter might face, or to her struggle to find a partner to help her raise the child. I assumed he worried that her life’s possibilities — like getting an education outside of the valley — were now foreclosed, or at least tightly constricted.
I reached the man’s guest house later that day and stopped for lunch. As I sat on the terrace, I could hear the newborn crying inside. An old man sat next to me in the sun. He gestured up at the gleaming face of Langtang Lirung rearing above us.
“Here is good water,” he said with satisfaction, ignoring the baby’s wailing. “We have the glacier, we have snow, we have good sun.”
I squinted up at the mountain. I couldn’t help but agree. Indeed, he and his neighbors seemed to have everything they needed (including income from a steady stream of foreign trekkers like me).
Today his words ring in my ears like an unwitting recitation of the disaster’s key ingredients.
A 2015 study in Science estimated that the Langtang avalanche generated a force roughly half that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Ten years later, we now know that, while the earthquake was the triggering event, climate change made it far more deadly.
Earlier this year, a team of scientists concluded that a combination of anomalously heavy snowfall had made the Langtang avalanche and its blast wave so powerful. That winter, the area had received unusually heavy snows. Then April brought unusually warm temperatures.
Both phenomena, the researchers explain, are linked to climate change.
The warm weather lubricated the anomalously deep snowpack with meltwater coursing underneath, where it met the rock. When the earthquake struck, it all slid on that watery bed down the mountain, gathering terrible speed. All that dispersed snow amplified the force of the avalanche blast, which in turn caused air pressure waves at least 15 times what’s needed to blow a person to the ground.
In the ten years since Langtang was wiped off the face of the Earth, we have learned a lot about the converging risks of climate-driven floods, heatwaves, droughts, fires and storms. Few of us live in the shadow of a hanging glacier. But we all live in the darkening shadow of a warming climate’s cascading risks. Scenarios that seemed extreme and improbable just a few years ago are now commonplace. Just ask the survivors of Helene in western North Carolina, or those who lost homes in Altadena and Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.
The people of Langtang didn’t live their lives thinking they were in the path of disaster, either. Like the rest of us, they were consumed with more quotidian life-or-death concerns.
On my way back down the valley a couple days after my encounter with the forlorn new grandfather, I visited the tidy, gorgeous, prosperous-seeming village of Langtang.
As I weaved through sunlit fields of young barley, a middle-aged woman stood up from her work and waved to me.
I waved back. She gave the most radiant smile I had ever seen. I can close my eyes and still see it today.
Four years later, the mountain fell on that woman’s home, on those sun-filled uplands.
In the Langtang Valley, more than 100 bodies were never recovered. I have wondered ever since if she was among them. And I have thought often of the baby girl whose cries I heard.
In 2011, after I returned to the US, I spent some time searching online for the father from Tennessee — to no avail. Armed with just a name that I could recall, I came up empty.
In the months and years after the 2015 disaster, I devoted time to a more grim online hunt. I searched web accounts of first responders and rescuers and the Facebook posts of families of those who perished. And I finally came across what I was dreading: the name of a three-year-old girl from the tiny village just below Langtang, missing and presumed dead. I could only conclude that this was the granddaughter of the distraught man I had met on the trail.
Today, I hear that man’s lament — “Her life is finished” — as a failure of imagination.
Despite all his fears, the girl’s life — and her mother’s too — had been full of promise and possibility. It ended before it really began.
I hear the other man’s words, too — “We have the glacier, we have snow, we have good sun” — in a similar but far more foreboding vein.
In his defense, who could ever imagine the mountain literally falling upon them?
Scientists, on the other hand, have long warned the rest of us to fear the “cascading impacts” of climate change.
Wildfires ravage bone-dry California hillsides, and then an atmospheric river comes on its heels, dropping heavy rains and triggering landslides on denuded slopes, spurring insurance companies to abandon entire neighborhoods. Prolonged droughts cause crops to fail, driving up food prices, triggering political unrest and the flow of refugees across borders, fueling xenophobia and the rise of authoritarian regimes.
These chain reactions, with physical-economic-political dominoes dropping in quick succession, are what I fear most when I envision a world that’s passed the threshold of 2 or 3 or, God forbid, 4 degrees C of warming. Life’s possibilities perilously narrowed, foreclosed upon for everyone’s children, including my own, by our collective failure to imagine cascading, worst-case scenarios — and take them seriously. To reckon with the suffering they imply.
Meanwhile, institutions like Morgan Stanley are blithely tucking apocalyptic forecasts into air conditioning stock recommendations to their clients. “We now expect a 3 degree world,” the bank’s analysts wrote recently:
The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.
On the bright side, however:
A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.
Along with enticing air conditioning company investment opportunities, climate change amplifies risks in ways we haven’t even begun to wrap our heads around.
A study published last month estimated that climate change could demolish 40 percent of global GDP by 2100 — a sharp increase over past economic projections that maxed out around 11 percent.
Why? Because those previous modeling estimates neglected to account for the fact that extreme weather in one country affects people living in other countries, too. A drought in Brazil or a flood in China can cause food insecurity in Mozambique or jack up the prices of essential medical supplies in Vietnam. If extreme weather such as drought strikes two breadbasket regions at the same time, for example, grain prices will surge everywhere.
As the world warms, we can expect more such knock-on effects. More cascading events like an anomalously heavy snowfall and warm temperatures working in concert to literally unglue a mountain, but on a far larger scale. And the shock waves will be felt everywhere.
Consider another study just published this week, which warned that, when the long-feared and overdue Cascadia earthquake finally hits the Pacific Northwest, climate change will make the flooding caused by the sudden subsidence of coastal land — the ground could sink by nearly seven feet — far worse than previously thought. (And the damage from this so-called “Big One” was already expected to be cataclysmic enough. To get a sense of just how cataclysmic, you can read Kathryn Schulz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 piece in The New Yorker, published just two months after the Nepal quake. “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast,” one FEMA official told Schulz.) “Climate-driven sea-level rise will compound the hazard,” the authors observed, more than tripling the flood risk posed by an earthquake to people living in the region by 2100. A Big One could generate tsunamis with waves 40 feet high. Sea-level rise will make those bigger, too.
The April 25th earthquake buried more than 70 homes in Langtang. By the following spring, survivors had re-established the trekking route — their economic lifeline — through the valley.
Today, there’s a new village a few hundred meters uphill from the old one, out of the path of future avalanches. The people of Langtang launched the grassroots Langtang Management and Reconstruction Committee just three months after the earthquake, and set about quickly began rebuilding their village. Many of the homes now double as guest-houses. Trekkers have returned. With their farm fields destroyed, the Langtangpas now depend more than ever on those tourists plying that rerouted trail, which now runs through a vast boulder-strewn graveyard.
As an American anthropologist who survived the earthquake has written, the people of Langtang offer us lessons in “wayfinding through broken worlds.”
As any regular consumer of news can attest, the world can seem a bit more broken with each passing day. But here’s something. Ten years ago, the mountain fell on Langtang. Yet Langtang persists.
A single house is all that remains of the old village, tucked under a cliff that sheltered it from the blast wave that carried with it all the added force of a fast-warming world.
“Wayfinding through a broken world.” If fossil fuel advocates and climate change deniers have the last word, that is our fate. The Lessons of Langtang is a story that she be spread far and wide!