February 21, 2021
The gush of particles from a mountain in the Himalayas ravaged remote valleys in Uttarakhand, India.
Sheer, glacier-covered ridges separated by canyons skyrocket over the Chamoli district in northern India. On the early morning of February 7, 2021, this amazing surface in Uttarakhand turned fatal when a gush of rock, ice, sediment, and water rose through the Rishiganga River valley past several towns and knocked into 2 hydropower stations.
The scale of the damage in the Himalayan district was ravaging. Hundreds of individuals were swept away by the disorderly rush of water and particles. Dozens of individuals, a lot of them employees at the power plants, lost their lives; others wound up caught in tunnels, triggering significant rescue efforts. Numerous houses, bridges, and roadways were destroyed.
On February 21, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 caught a view of the landscape in the wake of the occasion. In the image above, natural-color Landsat 8 information were overlaid on a digital elevation design from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) to illustrate the rugged topography.
January 20 – February 21, 2021
The image set above programs a closeup of the very same location prior to and after the particles circulation. Note the dark scar near the origin of the landslide and the path of dust and particles that blanketed the valley walls downstream.
Initially, there was some confusion about what triggered the disaster, however a group of remote picking up researchers have actually mined satellite information for hints to fill out the series of occasions.
Months prior to the landslide, satellite images revealed a crack opening on an ice-covered flank of Ronti, a 6,029-meter (19,780-foot) mountain peak. On February 7, 2021, a big portion of a high slope broke off from the peak, reducing part of a hanging glacier set down on the ridge. After freefalling for approximately 2 kilometers, the rock and ice shattered as it knocked into the ground, producing a huge landslide and dust cloud. As the speeding up rock and ice raced through Ronti Gad and after that Rishiganga River valley, it got glacial sediments and melted snow. All the products blended into a fast-moving slurry that overwhelmed the river and churned wildly as it hurried through the river valley.
January 20, 2021
What set off the rock and hanging glacier to fall in Uttarakhand stays an open concern. University of Calgary geomorphologist Dan Shugar is amongst a group of researchers looking for a response to that and other concerns about the catastrophe. As part of the effort, they are evaluating numerous kinds of meteorological, geologic, and modeling information to supplement and contextualize the satellite images. They wish to identify what function weather, the tectonic environment, and moving environment conditions may have played in priming the rock and ice for collapse.
February 21, 2021
“Unfortunately, there were no weather stations that we know of that were nearby, but we are looking at things like whether cycles of ongoing freezing and thawing may have weakened the rock,” stated Shugar. “Climate change may have even helped destabilize the rock face through increased water infiltration over a period of years and by thawing permafrost. For now, we can hypothesize about these possibilities, but careful work is required to understand exactly what happened.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, utilizing Landsat information from the U.S. Geological Survey and topographic information from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Story by Adam Voiland, with info from Dan Shugar (University of Calgary) and Christopher Shuman (NASA GSFC/UMBC JCET).
