Kashmiri geoscientist Irfan Rashid is using satellite imagery of Nepal’s recent catastrophic floods to decode how massive glacier-ice collapses trigger deadly downstream events.
By analysing Landsat, Planet and Sentinel data, he links this disaster to broader Himalayan risks, arguing that science-based, pre-emptive planning is vital as glacial lakes expand and climate-driven hazards intensify across Kashmir and Ladakh.
When images of the catastrophic floods in Nepal began circulating on social media, the scale and apparent violence of the event immediately caught Kashmiri geoscientist Irfan Rashid’s attention, and he scrambled to look for the landscape behind the headlines.
Rashid, Head of the Department of Geoinformatics at Kashmir University who spends much time in his lab and high-altitude landscapes studying glaciers and glacial hazards in Kashmir and Ladakh, began searching satellite archives for a glimpse of the source area “when I first became aware of the event through social media, particularly posts circulating on Instagram and X.”
Rashid examined imagery from United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer, Planet and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel missions.
It was not straightforward. Initially, Rashid told this writer, he was not very successful because much of the area was heavily cloud covered, while the timing of satellite overpasses was another constraint.
“Fortunately, Landsat 9 had an overpass shortly after the event, and the imagery provided a much clearer view of the failure zone, on 26th August. This was particularly useful because it allowed to examine the area where the event appears to have originated in considerably greater detail,” Rashid said.
Planet imagery and observations shared by geomorphologist Dan Shugar of the University of Calgary in Canada had already helped him identify the source area a day earlier. Taken together, the imagery pointed towards what Rashid described as a major ice collapse from the frontal part of a glacier, followed by the rapid downstream mobilisation of ice, rock, debris and water.
What particularly caught Rashid’s attention was the apparent magnitude of the collapse. The source area lies at around 5,200 metres above sea level, on a very steep slope. Preliminary estimates suggest that the event may have involved 100-200 million cubic metres of ice, rock and debris, although Rashid stressed that this remains an early estimate requiring much more rigorous analysis.
For Rashid, the scientific puzzle is therefore not yet solved. “The larger scientific question is not only what triggered this particular event, but whether similar vulnerable locations can be identified elsewhere in the Himalayas,” he said.
What happened in Nepal is not necessarily a blueprint for what could happen in Kashmir or Ladakh where Rashid studies glaciers and where glaciers, steep mountain slopes and high-altitude lakes form an increasingly complex hazard landscape. But it offers scientists another case through which to understand how seemingly different mountain processes can combine to produce catastrophic downstream impacts.
In that sense, Rashid’s work connects closely with what has happened in Nepal. Scientists cannot monitor every glacier, lake and mountain slope continuously. They first need to use satellite observations to identify potential hotspots and then focus detailed ground monitoring on the places where failure could have the greatest consequences.
The ultimate goal, Rashid said, should be to move “from being reactive after such disasters occur to being pre-emptive” by identifying vulnerable locations and assessing their risks before they fail.
The need to move from reacting to disasters to anticipating them is becoming increasingly urgent in Kashmir. One of Rashid’s own studies along with co-authors in January 2026 in the Journal of Glaciology mapped 155 glacial lakes across the Kashmir Himalaya and found that ice-contact proglacial lakes had expanded by 26 per cent between 1992 and 2024. It identified five lakes with very high susceptibility to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), with potential consequences for thousands of buildings, 15 major bridges, roads and a hydropower project.
Another study, published in Natural Hazards Review in 2025, found that potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the Jhelum basin had expanded by 30 per cent since 1980, while their feeding glaciers had shrunk by more than 40 per cent.
Research from the Warwan basin in Jammu and Kashmir has similarly identified a potentially hazardous glacial lake and found that settlements and infrastructure lie within possible GLOF inundation zones.
Together, these studies suggest that waiting for the next breach to understand the risk would be costly.
Scientists, Rashid noted, have generated credible evidence on climate change, emerging hazards and associated risks in the Himalayan region. “However, I feel, science alone cannot determine policy. Governments must balance scientific evidence with developmental priorities, economic considerations, institutional constraints and political realities,” he said,
According to Rashid, some risk-reduction measures do not require sophisticated science. Avoiding critical infrastructure and settlements in clearly vulnerable stream corridors, for instance, is a fairly basic principle of risk-informed planning.
Rashid hesitated to frame the gap between what we know and what we implement simply as governments ignoring science or scientists failing to communicate.
“It is fundamentally a science-policy-implementation gap. Bridging this requires sustained institutional engagement,” he said and added that integrating hazard science into spatial and infrastructure planning and establishing mechanisms of accountability and institutional learning after disasters can help putting scientists closer to the decision-making process.
Such a framework, Rashid noted, should seek what was known, what warnings reached authorities, and why action did or did not follow.