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KATHMANDU—The rains had briefly quelled, and beneath a bright mid-morning sky, 43-year-old Subash Tamang was working along the banks of the monsoon-swollen Trishuli River with his family. They were extracting sand, as they had done before, when the river suddenly rose to consume them.

Some 45 miles north, high in the Himalayas along the Nepal-Tibet border, a large section of a glacier had collapsed, sending a torrent of water, sediments, and boulders and swallowing downstream settlements. It took the flood barely 30 minutes to reach Tamang’s village in Nuwakot district, hitting with the terrible speed of a tsunami.

KATHMANDU—The rains had briefly quelled, and beneath a bright mid-morning sky, 43-year-old Subash Tamang was working along the banks of the monsoon-swollen Trishuli River with his family. They were extracting sand, as they had done before, when the river suddenly rose to consume them.

Some 45 miles north, high in the Himalayas along the Nepal-Tibet border, a large section of a glacier had collapsed, sending a torrent of water, sediments, and boulders and swallowing downstream settlements. It took the flood barely 30 minutes to reach Tamang’s village in Nuwakot district, hitting with the terrible speed of a tsunami.

Tamang survived by holding on to a patch of weed. But it swept away his wife, his two brothers and their wives, and his elder sister. The body of one of his brothers has been retrieved, while the five other family members remain missing. Tamang was ferried to Kathmandu for treatment two days later.

“I’ve lost everything,” he said from a hospital bed. “We didn’t receive any warning and weren’t expecting the water to rise that high. One moment I was hanging by the weeds, and the next moment when I looked, none of my family members were there. I now have a hole in my leg and my heart.”

Residents survey the damage following flash floods in Trishuli, Nepal, on Aug. 27.Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

The Aug. 26 flood has obliterated parts of three districts—Rasuwa, Dhading, and Nuwakot—in north and central Nepal, but the shock has reverberated throughout the country. The death toll from the flood has climbed to more than 1,000, with nearly 4,000 people still missing, of which nearly 600 are foreign nationals, many of them pilgrims to Tibet’s Mount Kailash, revered by both Hindus and Buddhists.

As quickly as disaster hit, such cataclysmic events have been decades in the making. Carbon emissions have steadily warmed the Himalayas and destabilized its glaciers. A February study shows that the temperatures in Nepal’s glacier collapse area have increased 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1940, twice the average global warming rate.

Low-income countries in the Hindu Kush—which stretches roughly 2,100 miles across eight countries, including Nepal—are paying a grim price for a climate crisis they did little to create. Floods and landslides have become routine and largely normalized despite significant loss of life and economic damage, but a disaster on this scale poses harder questions.

“The ecosystem and landscapes have evolved over geological time, but carbon emissions are changing them so quickly that they’re adapting on a human-dominated time scale,” Simon Cook, a geoscientist and senior lecturer at Scotland’s University of Dundee, told Foreign Policy.

An aerial view shows a torrent of muddy water surging past houses and through the Trishuli River in the aftermath of flash floods, near the Nepal-China border in the village of Syabrubesi in Nepal’s Rasuwa district on Aug. 31. Prabin Ranabhat/AFP via Getty Images

Almost a week after the event, scientists, including three Foreign Policy spoke with, have determined what caused the Aug. 26 disaster: a rock-ice avalanche. The glacial collapse and landslide occurred on the northern face of the Langtang Lirung peak—the 99th highest peak in the world—on the Nepali side bordering Tibet at around 8:37 a.m. Satellite........

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