🇺🇸 영어 원문
Roughly 160 people are dead and hundreds more—including dozens of international tourists—are missing after flash floods hit a region on the mountainous border of Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday. Devastating footage posted to social media shows people fleeing a wall of water that washed away buildings and vehicles.
Initial analysis of satellite imagery and reports from the Nepalese government indicate that the flood was likely triggered by a landslide caused after a piece of a glacier fell hundreds of feet.
As the region warms, its ice is becoming increasingly unstable, raising the risk of catastrophic flooding.
“The glaciers over there are definitely in retreat,” says Joseph Shea, an associate professor of geography at the University of Northern British Columbia. “There’s a lot of glacier mass up there, but we’re seeing thinning, we’re seeing retreating.”
Since 2000, the world’s glaciers have lost 5 percent of their ice, with much more drastic impacts in certain regions. Nepal’s glaciers lost nearly a quarter of their area between 1970 and 2010. More than 160 smaller glaciers in the country, research has found, have vanished entirely.
A recent study finds that 40 percent of the world’s glacial ice could disappear if the world does not keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The impacts of warming on glaciers in Nepal can cause cascading effects. Shea points out that retreating glaciers can help trigger landslides as they get smaller and can no longer hold back sediment. As these glaciers retreat, many are leaving large, dammed lakes at higher elevations. “If you have a landslide suddenly into a lake, you get an overtopping of the dam, and then the whole thing can collapse catastrophically,” Shea says. Known as glacial lake outburst floods, two of these events hit Nepal last year, and research shows millions are living in harms way around the world.
Wednesday’s disaster was more likely due to a glacial collapse that fell into the valley below. Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told the New York Times that satellite imagery suggested that a 2,000-foot-wide piece of ice may have fallen almost 4,000 feet, “[pulverizing] the ice into water” with the force of its fall. And while Shugar emphasized that it was still too early to make conclusive statements about the cause of the floods, he noted to Reuters that snow that was present on the glacier earlier in the week may have melted due to warm temperatures.
The collapse and debris flow were so large and forceful, they registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, according to the US Geological Survey.
Glaciers elsewhere have broken apart with destructive results. That includes the collapse of a Swiss glacier last year that buried a town while on a smaller scale, a glacier collapse in Italy in 2022 killed 11 mountaineers. Both were linked with rising temperatures.
🇰🇷 한국어 요약
이번 기사는 네팔과 티베트 사이의 산악 지역에서 발생한 대형 홍수 소식을 다룹니다. 급류가 마을을 덮치며 약 160명이 숨지고, 국제 관광객을 포함해 수백 명이 실종되었습니다. 소셜 미디어에 공개된 영상에는 건물과 차량을 쓸어가는 거대한 물결을 피해 도망치는 사람들의 모습이 담겨 있습니다.
위성 영상과 네팔 정부의 초기 분석 결과, 이번 홍수는 빙하의 일부가 수백 피트 아래로 떨어져 산사태를 일으킨 것이 직접적인 원인이었을 가능성이 크다고 합니다. 기온이 상승하면서 빙하는 불안정해지고, 얇아지며, 뒤로 물러나고 있습니다. 전문가들은 이 때문에 대형 산사태와 홍수의 위험이 커지고 있다고 말합니다.
2000년 이후 세계 빙하는 전체 얼음의 약 5퍼센트를 잃었고, 네팔의 빙하는 1970년에서 2010년 사이에 면적의 약 4분의 1을 잃었습니다. 연구에 따르면 네팔에서는 160개 이상의 작은 빙하가 완전히 사라졌습니다. 만약 전 세계 온도가 1.5도 이내로 상승을 막지 못하면, 세계 빙하 얼음의 40퍼센트가 사라질 수 있다는 연구도 있습니다.
빙하가 줄어들면 산사태나 빙하 호수 범람 같은 연쇄 재해가 일어날 수 있습니다. 특히 빙하 뒤로 막혀 있던 호수 위에 산사태가 갑자기 떨어지면 물이 둑을 넘어서 큰 재앙으로 이어질 수 있습니다. 이번 사건에서는 약 2,000피트 넓이의 얼음 조각이 약 4,000피트 아래로 떨어져, 그 충격으로 얼음이 물로 변하면서 큰 물결을 만든 것으로 추정됩니다. 이 붕괴와 흙과 바위의 흐름은 5.2 규모 지진으로까지 기록될 만큼 강력했습니다.
🔑 핵심 단어 (Vocabulary)
- flash floods – 갑자기 일어난 큰 물/급류 – flash floods hit a region on the mountainous border of Nepal and Tibet
- glacier – 빙하 – a piece of a glacier fell hundreds of feet
- retreat – 물러나다, 후퇴하다 – The glaciers over there are definitely in retreat
- catastrophic – 재앙적인, 큰 피해를 끼치는 – raising the risk of catastrophic flooding
- satellite imagery – 위성 영상 – Initial analysis of satellite imagery and reports from the Nepalese government
- sediment – 퇴적물, 모래나 흙 – retreating glaciers can no longer hold back sediment
- glacial lake outburst floods – 빙하 호수 범람 – Known as glacial lake outburst floods, two of these events hit Nepal last year
- magnitude – 규모, 정도 – they registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event
- debris – 파편, 부서진 조각 – The collapse and debris flow were so large and forceful
- harms way – 위험한 곳, 해를 입을 수 있는 상태 – research shows millions are living in harms way around the world
🔗 원문 링크
https://www.wired.com/story/rising-temperatures-contributed-nepals-deadly-flood/