A Chinese photographer accidentally captured the moment a massive ice-rock avalanche struck Mount Langtang Lirung in Nepal during a drone shoot on August 26. This has offered researchers new clues about the disaster that triggered a deadly chain of floods and landslides in the Himalayas.
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The footage, recorded from a mountaintop radar station in China, shows a white mass suddenly cascading down the mountain, followed by a huge brown dust cloud rising from the Lhende Khola Valley, according to a report by Nepal Times.
According to the analysis, the disaster appears to have been caused not simply by a glacier collapse but by the failure of the mountain's rock face beneath a hanging glacier. A massive combination of rock and ice then plunged about 1,500 metres down the north face before crashing onto the glacier below.
