10/26/2026
For years we treated geology like a slow movie: change over thousands or millions of years. Sudden change is just as real.
This landslide video has been going around. It hit the Kali Gandaki in Mustang on the afternoon of Sept 27, 2026 (Nepal time). Reports put it at Lete. Older imagery points to the same slope between Chhyo and Ghasa, around 28.623° N, 83.637° E.
It failed fast, but that hillside had been in trouble for a long time:
• In 1985 photos the scar was already bare.
• From 2020 through Dec 2025 the top edge barely moved, but the face got more gullied and the scarp line sat lower and lower.
• A slope like that is waiting for a shove. Three days of heavy rain gave it one.
Warnings starting Sept 24 got a lot of people out of the way, and that almost certainly saved lives. The next move is to act before the rain hits: use satellite records to map those long bare scars above rivers and roads, see which ones are moving, and put the worst ones on monitoring and early warning before the next monsoon.
Nepal has plenty of slopes like this. That’s the reason to rank them, not look away.
I’m not the geologist who can walk you through every mechanism. This is what the historical record already shows.
