The road to Nepal’s northern gateway with China is less a highway than a precarious line etched into the mountainside.
On one side, the slope rises almost vertically, scarred by fresh landslides and piles of loose rock. On the other, the Bhote Koshi plunges through a deep gorge. The Araniko Highway narrows repeatedly into rough tracks where trucks crawl over freshly dumped stones, while excavators work below unstable slopes. A single mistake, another spell of intense rain or a fresh slope failure can sever the only road linking this part of Nepal to China.
This is the landscape through which The New Indian Express travelled towards Tatopani-Liping, one of Nepal’s principal China trade gateways, where fear has acquired a new dimension after the catastrophic rock-ice avalanche and flood that devastated the Rasuwagadhi corridor on August 26. The road itself is already warning enough. Sections have repeatedly subsided into the Bhote Koshi, while landslides at several points have cut traffic for days and weeks. In August, China temporarily closed the Tatopani crossing because of landslide risks on the Nepali side.
Upstream, another question hangs over the valley. What happens if an unstable glacial lake or a collapsing glacier-fed slope unleashes another sudden flood into the Bhote Koshi? The fear is not of one confirmed “water bomb” sitting immediately above Tatopani. It is of a wider chain of hazards, including expanding glacial lakes, unstable ice, steep rock slopes, landslides and rivers that can rapidly transform a relatively small high-altitude failure into a devastating debris-laden flood.
For the people living here, however, the danger is not something they need a scientific paper to explain. They have watched the river take homes. They have watched the highway disappear. And now they have watched Rasuwagadhi disappear.
Living in constant fear
The vulnerability becomes particularly evident at Bahrabise, the major market area along the route and a settlement built in the flood-prone valley.
Hemantha Shrestha, a local businessman and politician from Bahrabise, points out the extent of the settlement and its importance to the surrounding communities. “This market is 300 years old. It’s a historical market,” he says, recalling the last major Bhote Koshi flood. Seven houses standing along the riverbank were swept away, he says.
“When the Trishuli flood came here, the local people were very scared. They are very troubled, but there is no alternative place,” Shrestha says. The government, he adds, has not made any alternative arrangements for them to live. “Even while holding fear in their hearts, they are living right here,” he says.
Bahrabise is not a tiny riverside hamlet that can simply be evacuated. Shrestha estimates that around 5,000 people live in the market at its peak, including local residents and tenants. There are around 200 shops and 500 houses. The market serves people from across nine wards of Bahrabise Municipality, five wards of Bhotekoshi Rural Municipality, six wards of Tripura Sundari and parts of Balefi Rural Municipality. People from 16-17 surrounding villages depend on the market. The main businesses are small food establishments, clothes and apparel shops. The market is about 26 km from the China border and is one of the major commercial centres on the route. That means that if the river rises dramatically, the consequences will extend far beyond the handful of houses immediately beside the water.
Further towards Tatopani, at Koplang, the fear is equally palpable. Furpa Tamang and Akriti Tamang, who run an eatery, have lived here for about 11 years. Their family moved down from a village after the earthquake. The old village, they say, now has only one or two people left. Older residents remain while many others have moved to Kathmandu.
“Anyone would be scared coming here,” one of the women says when asked whether she fears the river and the surrounding mountains. Furpa says the government does issue warnings. Residents have been told that what happened in Rasuwa could happen here too. “They tell us to stay alert. They say since it happened over there, it might happen here too, so stay alert, don’t stay near the riverbanks, move higher up,” she says. But moving higher is easier said than done. The village they once lived in has emptied. The lower settlement provides their livelihood. Their eatery depends on people travelling along the highway. “If it comes like that, we’d have to leave, of course. It will sweep us away,” she says.
The science behind the fear
A major research paper published in June 2026 by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences provides a sobering picture of the China-Nepal Himalayas.
The study, published in Advances in Climate Change Research, mapped 2,377 glacial lakes in the China-Nepal Himalayas and found that their total area increased by 27% between 1992 and 2022. The researchers identified 76 potentially dangerous glacial lakes and used machine-learning models and stochastic inundation simulations to assess their hazard and downstream exposure.
The numbers are striking, with 68.42% of the potentially dangerous lakes classified as very-high hazard and another 27.63% as high hazard. In other words, 96.05% were placed in the high or very-high hazard categories. Four lakes were ultimately classified as very-high risk and 14 as high risk.
The study’s warning is particularly relevant to this corridor because it does not look only at the lakes themselves. It also maps what lies downstream, including buildings, roads, bridges and hydropower facilities. The Poiqu river basin on the Chinese side feeds the river system that runs through Khasa (Zhangmu) and crosses into Nepal at the Tatopani-Liping corridor, where it becomes the Bhote Koshi. The basin has witnessed major glacial lake outburst floods, including events at Poiqu No. 1 in 2002 and Gongbatongsha Co in 2016, highlighting that the threat is not hypothetical.
The 2016 Gongbatongsha Co GLOF, in particular, sent a powerful flood downstream towards Nyalam and Khasa before the river entered Nepal. The 2002 Poiqu No. 1 outburst was even larger, demonstrating how a failure high in the transboundary basin can rapidly turn into a downstream disaster.
This reporter saw the towering buildings of China’s Khasa bazaar, which were earlier destroyed in 2015 earthquake. The researchers found that potential flood pathways intersect with 260.38 km of roads, 9.35 km of bridges and nine hydropower facilities. That is the vulnerability visible from the Araniko Highway.
There are no wide evacuation corridors here. There are no alternate highways running parallel to the valley. Houses, hotels, shops, power infrastructure and the international trade route are compressed between mountain slopes and the river.
China moves border officials
At the Tatopani border, the concern is shared by officials responsible for keeping the crossing functioning.
Padamraj Timalsina, an immigration officer at the border, told TNIE the news of the Rasuwagadhi disaster triggered a period of panic among officials. Yet they could not simply abandon the border.
“However, at that moment, we were not in a position to leave and close the office,” h e says, describing how officials were divided among travel, arrival and departure duties to keep the crossing functioning.
On the other hand, China has moved its border security, immigration and customs officials to a safer area, according to people at the border. The shift has added to the sense that both sides recognise the vulnerability of the corridor.
Asked whether Tatopani faces a risk similar to Rasuwa, Timalsina said: “Yes, the risk level here is similar. The upstream region of the Bhote Koshi river, just like Rasuwa’s Bhote Koshi, has three to four glacial lakes located within a 20 to 25 km radius.”
If these lakes burst, he said, the risk of flooding in the Bhote Koshi would be extremely high. The problem becomes even more serious when the question turns to evacuation. “Currently, we do not have ready-made vehicles or equipment to evacuate people like that,” Timalsina says. There are sirens and public-address systems. Early-warning SMS alerts are also used. “But we do not have any immediate equipment or resources to rescue people using vehicles, helicopters, or drones,” he says.
His estimate of the population exposed along the river is about 10,000 people from Bahrabise towards the upper regions. “Yes, they are in a state of risk. A flood could hit at any time, but if it comes instantly, saving their lives would be extremely difficult,” he says.
Timalsina says Chinese counterparts do share alerts. “They update us via WeChat, call us on the phone, and alert us to remain vigilant,” he says. “They have assured us that in case of any disaster, they will share immediate information.” But information is only useful if people have somewhere to go.
NISAR offers a new eye
One of the most promising developments is now orbiting overhead. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, is designed to detect changes in land and ice, including glacier movement, landslides and ground deformation. Unlike optical satellites, radar can operate through clouds and darkness, an especially important advantage in the monsoon-soaked Himalayas. And there is already evidence of what it can reveal. Analysis of NISAR observations from before the August disaster detected metre-scale cumulative movement around the eventual source area of the ice-rock avalanche, with deformation concentrated on the steep slope that later failed.
Birendra Bajracharya, senior geospatial scientist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and former head of SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya, has stressed the potential of NISAR for Himalayan hazard monitoring.
“We have started using NISAR data to conduct some analysis. It will be valuable to study glacier flow and topographic changes for monitoring the glacial environment,” he told TNIE. The value of such data is not that it can predict every collapse, but that it can reveal changes that are difficult to observe from the ground. But satellites cannot eliminate uncertainty. A moving slope is not necessarily a collapsing slope. A growing lake is not necessarily about to burst.
And the June study itself acknowledges limitations, including uncertainties in elevation data, incomplete historical GLOF records and the possibility of underestimating extreme inundation.
A valley already living on the edge
Back on the Araniko Highway, the science becomes tangible. The road climbs around fresh cuts in the mountain, with boulders scattered across the track. In places, the slope below appears to have been assembled from rubble. Heavy machinery sits beside newly constructed channels and hydropower infrastructure. The Bhote Koshi races below, opaque with sediment.
This is a valley where one hazard can amplify another. This reporter spotted at least four new hydropower plants currently under construction in the narrow valley.
The scale of hydropower development makes the question of resilience particularly important. Nepal has tens of hydropower projects either operating, under construction or in the pipeline, many of them located in precisely the steep Himalayan terrain where landslides, floods and glacial hazards can converge. The August disaster has destroyed 12 hydropower plants, knocking off 10% of the country’s power supply. This has already forced a rethink. Nepal Electricity Authority spokesperson Rajan Dhakal has said “the time has come for a rethink of our hydropower policy”, while stressing that the design and operation of plants would need to improve in the face of extreme floods.
Risk profile
2,377 glacial lakes mapped across the China–Nepal Himalayas
27% rise in lake area from 199.07 sq km in 1992 to 252.87 sq km in 2022
19.9% rise in lake numbers from 1,983 to 2,377 over three decades
76 potentially dangerous lakes assessed for GLOF susceptibility in the study region
18 highest-risk lakes 4 very high risk + 14 high risk, requiring priority mitigation
50-km impact corridor: most modelled potential flood zones extend up to 50 km downstream
260.38 km of roads exposed within potential inundation zones
9.35 km of bridges exposed, including critical connectivity infrastructure
9 hydropower projects exposed
The corrected assessment identified nine facilities in potential flood zones
1981 warning: Over 200 killed — the Cirenmaco GLOF destroyed the China–Nepal Friendship Bridge, highway and Sun Koshi hydropower plant
(This reporter is a resident fellow of the Climate Change Media Hub at the Asian College of Journalism. The programme is supported by Interlink Academy Germany)