A cascade, not a flood: testing the competing accounts of the 26 August 2026 Lhende Khola–Bhote Koshi disaster

Identity and coverage

Catalogue identifier: res-26a4d953-2a19-45dc-9dcb-2a38ada3998a
Persistent identifier: 10.31223/x51j54
Resource version: Version 1
Publication date: 2 September 2026
Last updated: 2 September 2026
Metadata reviewed: 4 September 2026
Language: English
Geographic coverage: Source catchment above Lhende Khola at the China–Nepal border and the downstream Bhote Koshi–Trishuli corridor in Nepal; the manuscript’s USGS catalogue analysis spans 84–87° E and 27–29.5° N.
Bounding box (WGS 84): [84, 27, 87, 29.5]
Temporal coverage: 1 January 2019 to 1 September 2026; Multi Year Baseline And Event Analysis
Themes: Source Mechanism, Ice–Rock Avalanche, Landslide Dam, Glacial Lakes, Remote Sensing, Hydropower Impacts

Production method: Tests event-mechanism claims using the ICIMOD lake inventory, 2019–2025 Sentinel-2 water occurrence, USGS seismic records, a pre-event topographic stage–area–volume relation, and official reporting.
Provenance: Authored by Ishfaq Gujree and deposited in EarthArXiv; the repository record, Crossref metadata, and current PDF establish the DOI, version, dates, authorship, and licence.
Validation: Not Peer Reviewed
Uncertainty: The initiating mechanism remains undetermined; the study reports failure volume as unconstrained without a post-event elevation surface and distinguishes evidence of warming from causal attribution of the collapse.
Limitations: A post-event elevation model was not publicly available, so failure volume, energy, and mobility remain unconstrained; 93% post-event cloud cover limited optical monitoring, and 20 m C-band radar did not reliably resolve the small impoundment.

WGS 84 bounding box: [84, 27, 87, 29.5]

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