India, Aug. 27 -- Thousands are missing and at least 320 dead after a wall of ice and rock broke off a mountainside on the Tibetan side of the Nepal-China border on the morning of August 26 and cascaded through the Lhende-Bhote Koshi-Trishuli river system. Six major hydropower plants have been destroyed, a Nepal-China border crossing has been washed away, and - in what captures how the severe the event was - the collapse registered as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake, with the seismic signal read by earthquake monitoring centres around the world.

The exact trigger will take months of analysis to pin down, but the early signs point in one direction: the climate crisis. The mountain region where the collapse originated has been warming at severa...