At 8:37 on Wednesday morning, August 26, 2026, the U.S. Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 5.2 event near the Nepal–Tibet border. For an hour, seismologists logged it as an earthquake. By day's end, scientists at Kathmandu's International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD, concluded something else: the bedrock under a glacier in Langtang National Park had collapsed, and a section of ice two thousand feet across had fallen seven thousand feet into the Lhende Khola, a tributary of the Trishuli River. Anjana Raja, a Bay Area tourist in Rasuwa that morning, told CBS News "it looked like a tsunami, but dark black."
Along one stretch of the Trishuli, the water rose twenty-seven feet in thirty minutes.