Paul Salopek: Yeah, it was something new to me. It’s something called a geohazard. Mountains, you know, tear themselves down all the time through millions of years of erosion. But apparently, what’s happening is that with the climate crisis — the human-made climate crisis — accelerating around the world, these colder parts of the world, where there are vertical slopes, you know, mountains in the Arctic and in very high altitudes where there’re glaciers, the glaciers are starting to melt, the permafrost is starting to fall. And then you add in increased rains — instead of snowing, it’s raining — so it creates more runoff. And then seismicity, right? Earthquakes … all is leading to an increase in landslides across the world, anywhere where these are these conditions. 

Yeah, one of the places where it actually has the greatest threat to human life is what scientists call the Third Pole. We all know about the North Pole and the South Pole. But the third is the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the world. They have lots of glaciers, and therefore they’re highly vulnerable to this phenomenon … and they’re relatively highly populated. In the highlands of northern India, for example, hundreds of people every year die from landslides. Now, it’s not always melting glaciers. It could be that snow isn’t falling and you’ve got torrential rain, weakening the sides of mountains, but this is indeed a global phenomenon, and it’s getting worse. 

Very dramatic. I remember there was footage that appeared online, and basically, it was the same thing, Carolyn. Glaciers are rivers of ice, and they’re hemmed in by peaks, right? By mountains. They’re basically flowing down the sides of very high peaks and into valleys. And when those mountainsides — which have sometimes been frozen for thousands of years since the last glaciation — melt, they actually start shearing off and collapsing. What happened in Switzerland is what occurred. A mountain crumbled on top of an already weakened glacier, and it basically collapsed the glacier, which then went rumbling down and obliterated a town, a village.

To get to the site, I was walking with a geologist named Bretwood Higman to the site where he and his colleague implant motion sensors to start prototyping an early warning system. We had to paddle about six kilometers, something like four miles across a glacial lake that was very choppy, blown by icy winds blowing off this glacier. We had to stash our extra gear on a cliffside with ropes to keep it out of the reach of grizzly bears. And then we had to climb almost a vertical kilometer up to the sides of this very steep scarp. Carrying heavy loads of scientific equipment in our backpacks. I was not just huffing and puffing; I thought I was gonna be murdered by gravity, and this geologist, Higman, was just bouncing up there like a doll sheep.

Basically, the way it was explained to me is that you can see tremors increase. Their frequency starts to increase. And that doesn’t tell you exactly when it may happen. And Higman, he was very plain, he said, “Paul, some of these things have been hanging in a kind of suspended animation for centuries, and others kind of surprise us. They happen behind our backs, and we don’t have it down yet. The science of predicting it is complicated.” Another way, other than motion sensors, is subsonic sound, which is kind of cool. Some scientists have implanted listening devices into the sides of mountains, which emit sounds that the human ear can’t hear, increasing in frequency up until slightly before the mountain collapses. Then it goes kind of dead silent for this ominous period before the mountain slides down. So, they’re trying different technologies to give human beings a little warning that a catastrophe is about to happen.

Absolutely. I think we’re just going to have to become more alert as the world shifts under our feet, in this case, literally. As I mentioned in my story, we camped out on top of the ridge that was cracking, and there’s these huge cracks. You can see the roots of plants being stretched taut across these cracks. That’s how quickly it’s moving. And, we slept in sleeping bags on top of the tundra. And I just remember putting my ear to that, even though I knew I couldn’t listen. It was like putting my ear to the chest of a patient who had some terminal illness.

I’ve been seeing evidence of pretty dramatic climate change for the last 13 years on my walking project. Everything from places getting drier to places getting wetter. I think climate change is pretty much everywhere. It’s global and indisputable. So, this was just the latest evidence in a dramatic way, kind of with a bang, that this is something we’re going to have to start really getting used to in our lifetimes.