Why Nepal's rare, deadly flood struck without warning

Nearly three thousand people are missing and close to seven hundred are dead after a flash flood tore through Nepal's Rasuwa district and the Tibet border region this week with almost no warning, Axios reports. The cause: a chunk of glacier and mountain debris broke off Lāngtāng Lirung, releasing energy comparable to a magnitude five point two earthquake, which dammed a river until it burst and sent a debris-laden flood roughly one hundred kilometers downstream. Investigators call it a "blue-sky flood" — no rain, no earthquake, no rising river to trigger the region's warning systems, which are built to watch weather and rivers, not mountainsides. Researchers haven't confirmed climate change caused it, but warming-driven permafrost thaw is the leading theory, and experts are now pushing for mountain-monitoring systems to catch the next one before it happens.

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