If you think the Langtang Lirung glacier disaster on the Tibet-Nepal border was bad, wait for Lake Sarez.
There is no reason to downplay the August 26th catastrophe, when a large section of glacier and underlying rock at 17,000 feet of elevation failed and plunged almost 4,000 feet into the valley below. The impact registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event. Thousands of people died.
Himalayan glaciers have been melting at an accelerating rate due to climate change, causing ice avalanches, rockfalls and glacial-lake outburst floods. And the worst is yet to come.
A thousand miles northwest across the Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt from Langtang Lirung in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan is Lake Sarez, 10,700 feet above sea level. Experts call it Central Asia’s Sword of Damocles.
Lake Sarez formed in 1911 when a massive earthquake (estimated at 7.7) triggered a massive rockslide that blocked the Murgab River, creating the Usoi Dam—at over 1,500 feet high, the world’s tallest natural dam. The lake has backed up, deepened and lengthened over the past century.
I trekked up there in 2007 to research an article for Men’s Journal. Sarez was 37 miles long, a mile wide and 600 feet deep. As in the Himalayas and in mountains around the planet, glaciers in the Pamirs that had been frozen solid for thousands of years are melting away. The lake is now about 40 miles long, more than 1,600 feet deep, and holds four cubic miles of water.
Water wants to come down.
A lot of water.
At high altitude.
Usoi Dam has held for more than a century. It even survived a 7.2 earthquake in 2015. The big worry is that a major landslide from the unstable slopes around the stunning, bright blue lake falls into the water, generating a displacement wave capable of overtopping the dam (a similar scenario to the failure of levees during Hurricane Katrina) and releasing a destructive flood beginning as much as 1,000 feet high down the narrow Bartang, Pyanj and Amu Darya river valleys.
Such a A worst-case flood would sweep through Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
I wrote from a cliff overlooking the Murgab River in 2007: “Looking back down the valley, it was easy to envision floodwater gushing toward Barchadev and beyond, turning south at the Murgab’s confluence with the Bartang River. The 75-mile Bartang Valley, cultural and spiritual heartland of the Ismaili Muslims, would lose 30 villages and 7,000 people. The Bartang empties into the Pyanj, a large river that marks the border with northern Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan. Six hundred miles downstream from Lake Sarez, the flood would cross into another time zone. Even this far downstream, Scott Weber of the U.N. Department for Humanitarian Affairs told New Scientist in 1999, ‘the wall of water would still be as high as a two-story house.’”
I described the worst-case scenario: “The city of Termiz in southern Uzbekistan is home to 140,000 people, the Uzbek-Afghan Friendship Bridge that the Soviets used to invade Afghanistan, and currently a German airbase with 3,000 NATO troops. Termiz would be obliterated. The water would keep going. The Pyanj is a tributary of the Amu Darya, which Alexander the Great knew as the Oxus. The flood path would continue along the Amu Darya, roughly marking the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, before emptying into the shrunken Aral Sea, 1,200 miles downstream of Sarez. The flood would actually do the Aral more harm than good, dredging up heavy metals and toxic sediments currently locked in the dry seabed. The ancient Silk Road cities of Khiva and Turkmenabat (100,000 people total) would be destroyed, as would most of the arable land in Central Asia. Five million people—mostly residents of landlocked deserts that routinely reach 125°F—would be drowned by snow melt.”
A tunnel mitigation project to slowly lower the level of the lake, tap its hydroelectric power and/or bottle its crystal-clear water would eliminate the threat. But the site would be expensive to reach. There is no proper road. Tajikistan is a poor, remote and mountainous country that can neither finance a multi-billion-dollar high-altitude construction job nor attract international attention, much less donors. (I sent my 2007 story to the UN and other international entities; no one ever replied.)
Other than a primitive monitoring system that may or may not get warnings out to lower altitudes,, nothing has been done. Meanwhile, Sarez is warming even faster than the global average. More extreme freeze–thaw cycles, less snow cover, and thawing ground are loosening rock and debris on the lake’s banks. The landslide threat is more pronounced than ever.
Yet the world has no interest in dropping the $4 billion—what it costs the U.S. to fight Iran for four days—that it would cost to avoid a Sarez dam collapse. Fatalistic Tajiks wait to die in a natural disaster so predictable that the earliest prediction models date to the Soviet era.
In the high Andes of Peru, Lake Palcacocha poses a similar threat to 900,000 people living below in Huaraz. Tibet and Nepal must still worry about Sarez-like lakes including Cirenmaco, Galongco and Gangxico.
From the Texas Hill Country disaster of 2025 to last weekend’s fatal inundation of the Grand Canyon, Americans are not immune from climate change-related flash floods.
The world has decided not to try to arrest or reverse human-caused climate change. Anyway, it’s probably too late. The question for us has become: will we act now in order to mitigate the damage and death tolls from the inevitable catastrophes we see coming?
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
