The Shrinking Third Pole

Abstract

Dig Tsho is another glacial lake high in the Himalaya of Nepal. On a summer afternoon in 1985, the lake’s waters burst from their bowl of ice and rock. An inland tsunami flooded the valleys below, sweeping away potato fields, yaks, and a hydropower plant. It was a Buddhist festival day in the Sherpa village of Thamo. Thamo’s residents are descendants of families that five hundred years ago came over the mountains from nearby Tibet to settle the region known as the Khumbu, below what Westerners call Mt. Everest. People were drinking chang, laughing and having fun. At four o’clock in the afternoon one woman, standing on a ridge above the Bhote Koshi, heard a sound like the roar of an airplane, then felt the ground begin to shake. The woman yelled to the other villagers, who came down to see a wall of water approaching from upriver. Those who lived on the slope closest to the river ran into their houses, grabbed religious items—portraits of monks, statues from family chapels, and Buddhist texts—along with leather trunks holding money and family jewelry. Some ran uphill to neighbors’ houses and waited, while others carried images of Buddhist deities down to the riverbank and pointed them at the advancing flood, pleading for the river to change its course. Elderly men and women in Thamo and nearby villages believe they know what caused the flood. They say a Sherpa man was tending his yaks in the high, sparse pastures near Dig Tsho that August. The morning of the flood, a stray dog ate his bowl of curd. The herder was so angry he grabbed the dog, tied its legs so it couldn’t swim, and threw it into the lake. The act of cruelty angered a local deity, who caused a big chunk of the glacier to break off and fall into the lake. The water surged out. There were no human casualties in the Sherpa villages high in the Khumbu, but lower down the channel, along the Dudh Koshi, people drowned in the churning river.