You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as marked by last week’s horrific events in Nepal and Tibet. We still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the idea that a changing climate can impact what scientists call the geosphere, but the evidence has long been incontestable.

In 2021, a similar deluge ripped through a series of mountain valleys in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, severely damaging two hydroelectric power plants and taking about 200 lives. In August 2025, a colossal landslide in an Alaskan fjord created a 500-metre-high wave in an area frequented by cruise ships. A few months earlier, the collapse of part of a glacier in Switzerland’s Valais canton caused a debris-laden torrent that destroyed and buried most of the already evacuated village of Blatten.

What all four events have in common is that they involve what is known as the cryosphere – the sum total of the planet’s frozen water. The fact that ice, snow and permafrost are severely affected by global heating should come as no surprise, and this means that the poles and high mountain regions are bearing the brunt. Everywhere, the cryosphere is receding rapidly, and this is bad news.

As glaciers retreat, they expose unstable terrain that is often ripe for landslides. The swift thawing of permafrost as global heating causes freezing levels to progressively rise also means that........

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