Uttarakhand Glacial Burst: A glacier burst in the Tapovan-Reni area of Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district shook the nation on Sunday, as the Alakananda and Dhauli Ganga rivers became flooded. The homes close to the rivers have been heavily broken and so was the Rishiganga energy project, exactly where about one hundred workers have been deployed, and of them, some of them are feared dead. The glacier burst, having said that, has left scientists all more than the nation asking yourself what precisely occurred that triggered this occasion. Amid this, the Director General of Geological Survey of India, Dr Ranjit Rath mentioned that the glaciers in the Himalayas have been retreating due to the climate modify.
Adding that this was taking place at a international scale, he mentioned that as time passed, often glacier lakes close to terminus coalesced collectively to type huge glacial lakes which have been dammed by a mixture of loose boulders, sand, and gravels containing dead ice, referred to as glacial moraines. These moraines, due to the composition, have been weak.
He added that such lakes have been extremely prevalent on Himalayan glaciers, and the outbursts like the one in Uttarakhand, referred to as Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), resulted in a substantial volume of water getting discharged, damaging places falling in the downstream.
He additional mentioned that the breach in the glacial lake can be triggered by a lot of items like an avalanche or a landslide in the lake’s periphery, a cloudburst in catchment, snout’s calving, piping in the moraine dam, or a powerful earthquake.
Rath added that right after the Kedarnath cloudburst tragedy of 2013 that struck the state, the creation of an inventory of glacial lakes in the Uttarakhand Himalayas started in 2014, in order to recognize the GLOF higher-threat places and the workout was concluded in 2016. The remote sensing and multi-spectral information was analysed and it was discovered that excluding the supra-glacial lakes, the state had 486 glacial lakes, of which 13 have been discovered to be vulnerable.
Meanwhile, more than 200 persons have gone missing in these floods and rescue operations are underway.