In July 2026, a stretch of the Yamunotri National Highway simply disappeared.

After days of incessant rain, a landslide came down at Syanachatti in Uttarakhand's Uttarkashi district and washed away nearly 100 metres of the road. The highway was cut off for two days. Around 100 pilgrims were left stranded on the wrong side of the gap, until rescuers secured a rope along an alternative path and guided them across, one by one. That same weekend, heavy rain across Uttarakhand triggered landslides that blocked around 120 roads, including three national highways.

If you have travelled through the Himalayas during the rains, you may have seen a smaller version of this yourself. The bus stops. A little further ahead, mud has spilled across the road, or a section has cracked at the edge, or there is simply no road at all — only a raw brown scar running down the mountainside.

And it leaves you wondering: why do these roads keep washing away? It is easy to point at the rain. But the rain itself is changing. And so is the ground it falls on.

This story is part of "Climate Change, Explained Like You're 10" — The Better India's series that connects the things you see around you to a warming planet, in language simple enough to explain to your children. Because 'climate change' shouldn't be a phrase reserved for scientists and summits. It's already showing up on your street, in your tap, on your plate.

Why did 100 metres of highway simply wash away?

A road in the hills is not really on the ground. It is cut into a mountain.

Above the road at Syanachatti, as along most hill roads, is a slope — usually steep, made of layers of soil and rock. Below it may be a valley, a river, or a steep drop. Water has its own routes down these slopes, shaped over thousands of years. When a road is built, some of those natural contours have to be changed: the mountain is cut back, drainage is altered, vegetation is removed, and as traffic grows, the road is widened.

Most of the time, the slope holds. What tips it over is water — and specifically, a lot of water arriving very fast. The most extreme version of this has a name: a cloudburst. India's weather department defines a cloudburst as more than 100 millimetres of rain falling in a single hour over a small area, roughly 20 to 30 square kilometres. That is close to a month's worth of rain for many cities, dropped on one hillside in sixty minutes. The soil cannot absorb it fast enough.

Here is what all that water does to a slope.

Imagine a kitchen sponge. Pour a little water on it and it soaks it up. Keep........

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