Nepali authorities ordered rescue teams searching for flood survivors in the Himalayas to move to safe ground on Friday (28), after a lake formed by recent landslides burst in Tibet. The incident raised the risk of new flash floods and temporarily suspended operations, according to Folha de S.Paulo, citing the AFP and Reuters news agencies. The still preliminary death toll from the disaster reached 543.

Of that total, 538 deaths were recorded in Nepal, according to a police tally released on Friday morning, and 5 on the Chinese side, according to China's state media. More than 1,400 people remain missing. Victim figures are not centralized and are released separately by authorities and media on each side of the border.

The lake that gave way on Friday morning in Tibet is one of several formed by dammed water after the landslide that triggered the tragedy. Nepal's Army reported that the water level rose about 60 centimeters after the alert, and Nepali police told all rescue workers to seek protection. On the Chinese side, rescue teams were also pulled back to safe areas. Hours later, Chinese state media said the flood risk was under control, and search operations resumed.

The glacier collapse and the climate warning

The disaster began on Wednesday (26), when part of a glacier broke away from Mount Langtang Lirung, on the Nepali side of the border, near the Lhende river, according to an official assessment reported by BBC News Brasil. The mass of ice, rock and mud temporarily blocked the Lhende Khola river and, when the blockage gave way, a wave swept through the region's narrow valleys, burying homes, toppling bridges and destroying power plants along the road linking Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, to Lhasa in Tibet. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) first registered a magnitude 4.4 tremor moments before the flood, but later corrected itself: the seismic event, equivalent to magnitude 5.2, was a consequence of the glacier collapse itself hitting the valley floor, not its cause. The Red Cross estimates that more than 90,000 people were affected, and trucks carrying humanitarian aid were unable to reach the hit areas.

Scientists link the sequence of events to global warming. Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Disaster Studies Center at Tribhuvan University in Nepal, told the BBC there is a risk of second and third flood waves, and that Nepali researchers are discussing the situation with colleagues in China. "Climate change is really happening," he said. Simon Cook, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland who specializes in glaciology, explained that warming may be degrading permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that helps hold mountain slopes together, which would make high mountain environments more unstable. He pointed to similar events in recent years in the Himalayas, Switzerland and Italy's Dolomites.

With dammed lakes on both sides of the border still at risk of bursting, monitoring teams keep tracking river levels in the Langtang region. Researchers caution that the exact sequence of the collapse still needs to be confirmed through satellite image analysis. Meanwhile, the search for more than 1,400 missing people continues in the mud, now under constant watch for new alerts coming from the Tibetan side.