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

Event-specific case study testing competing trigger accounts with a glacial-lake inventory, seven years of Sentinel-2 water occurrence, the USGS seismic catalogue, pre-event topography, and official impact records.

Status
Included
Provider
EarthArXiv
Resource type
Scholarly Preprint
Evidence class
Multi Source Event Analysis

Completed catalogue assessment

Eligibility decision
Include · Include
Assessment date
28 September 2026
Decision reason
Original source identity and relevant content established; exact unsupported metadata replaced and evidential limits recorded.
Metadata corrections
{"validation_status":"not_peer_reviewed","limitations":"Source paper tests specified competing accounts using its search windows and detection limits; no catalogue absence establishes that an unrecorded event could not have occurred. Its derived topography is pre-event.","reviewed_on":"2026-09-28","current_status":"eligibility_assessed","geographic_scope":"The manuscript study area and an explicitly specified USGS event-query window, 84–87° E and 27–29.5° N; the recorded bounding box represents that query, not a mapped event footprint."}

View the complete assessment and exclusion ledger.

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
28 September 2026
Language
English
Geographic coverage
The manuscript study area and an explicitly specified USGS event-query window, 84–87° E and 27–29.5° N; the recorded bounding box represents that query, not a mapped event footprint.
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

Method and provenance

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Not Peer Reviewed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
Source paper tests specified competing accounts using its search windows and detection limits; no catalogue absence establishes that an unrecorded event could not have occurred. Its derived topography is pre-event.

Access and reuse

Access
Direct Open; open access route
Licence
CC-BY-4.0; licence evidence
Redistribution
Permitted Under Stated Licence
Catalogue status
Included

Assets

1 asset

Authoritative metadata sources

Spatial extent

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Recorded bounding box