Nepal-Tibet flash floods kill over 350, more than 1,000 missing

Houses lie partially submerged in muddy water along a riverside after flash floods at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal's Nuwakot district. — Houses lie partially submerged in muddy water along a riverside after flash floods at Trishuli Bazar in Nepal’s Nuwakot district

(Image credit: Prabin Ranabhat / AFP via Getty Images)

What happened

A catastrophic mix of floodwater and mud crashed through Himalayan valleys in Nepal and China-administered Tibet on Wednesday, killing at least 359 people, officials said this morning. More than 1,300 people were reported missing, including 517 foreigners in Nepal and 260 foreigners in Tibet. The death toll is expected to rise as rescue teams reach areas cut off by washed-away roads and bridges and buried under up to 6 feet of mud.

Scientists around the world are “trying to solve the mystery of what caused such a destructive flood,” The Wall Street Journal said. The “leading hypothesis” is that a “large piece of a glacier broke off and tumbled hundreds of feet into the valley below, where the ice was pulverized into water by the sheer velocity of the fall.” The impact of the “enormous chunk of ice — possibly a half-mile wide,” registered as the “equivalent of a 5.2-magnitude earthquake and crushed the ice into a fast-moving mix of water, ice and rock that pulverized everything in its path,” said The New York Times.