Planet Earth has suffered and is still enduring a punishing summer in 2026.
Last week, a massive section of glacier-covered mountain near the Nepal-Tibet border simply gave way, plunging roughly 1,200 meters into the valley below and unleashing an avalanche of ice, rock, mud and water that tore through settlements along the river.
The collapse was so violent that it generated seismic energy equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 event, briefly leading observers to believe an earthquake had triggered the catastrophe.
Scientists now say the reverse appears to have happened - the falling mountain caused the shaking.
The death toll in Nepal has climbed above 900 and nearly 4,500 missing.
Gravity is natural. Glaciers advance and retreat. Mountains fracture. Avalanches and floods have shaped the Himalayas for millennia. But that description no longer tells the whole story.
The precise trigger that caused this particular mass of ice and rock to fail is still being investigated. Scientists should be careful about attributing a single collapse directly to climate change.
What is much clearer is that the environment in which such failures occur is changing.
Human-caused warming is rapidly shrinking glaciers across the Himalayas and thawing the permafrost that helps bind high mountain slopes together. Warmer conditions can accelerate snowmelt, expose rock that had long been insulated by ice and weaken the frozen material holding steep terrain in place.
Researchers therefore increasingly worry not simply about melting glaciers, but about mountains becoming structurally less stable as the climate warms.
Nepal's disaster was not the familiar glacial lake outburst flood, in which meltwater accumulates behind a natural barrier until the barrier breaks. Nor does evidence point to a man-made dam collapse.
The infrastructure along the river — including hydropower facilities — was in the path of the disaster, not its apparent cause.
The sequence was more disturbing precisely because it was less familiar: glacier and rock collapsed, an enormous debris flow entered the river system and several hazards cascaded into one another.
The source material on the disaster describes a Himalaya already losing ice at an accelerating rate and warns that conventional flood-warning systems may struggle with events generated by rapidly destabilizing mountains and raises an uncomfortable question far beyond Nepal.
If even mountains can no longer be treated as permanent, what exactly is safe?
For South Korea, the immediate answer requires some perspective.
Climate change does not distribute the same disaster to every country. It pushes against the particular physical and social weaknesses each country already has.
For Nepal, one of those weaknesses is a vast high-altitude landscape increasingly destabilized by disappearing ice.
For Korea, it is a densely populated, mountainous peninsula containing enormous concentrations of people, homes, transport networks and economic assets in relatively small spaces.
The hazards are therefore different: extreme rainfall, urban flooding, landslides, heat waves, drought, wildfires, coastal flooding and typhoons.
The Korea Meteorological Administration said 2025 was the country's second-hottest year on record. Even though annual rainfall was broadly around normal levels, rainfall exceeding 100 millimeters in a single hour was observed at 15 locations.
This year was no different, repeatedly swing between extreme heat, torrential rain, drought and wildfire.
A broader government assessment published last year, based on more than 2,000 Korean and international studies, concluded that warming on the Korean Peninsula is intensifying and that heat waves and extreme rainfall are already increasing and are expected to become stronger and more frequent.
The significance lies not merely in hotter summers or heavier rain.
It lies in what happens when extremes begin exceeding the assumptions on which society was built.
A drainage system designed around the rainfall patterns of the past can become inadequate when extraordinary cloudbursts become more common.
A mountain slope that survived decades of monsoons can fail after unprecedented rainfall. A forest stressed by prolonged drought can become fuel for a fire of an intensity rarely experienced before.
A coastal defense built around historical sea levels becomes progressively less protective as those levels rise.
And a power grid built for yesterday's summer temperatures must operate through longer periods of extreme cooling demand.
The Korean government effectively acknowledges that adjustment is necessary. Its latest climate adaptation measures call for stronger infrastructure design standards reflecting future flood risks, expanded AI-based flood forecasting and tougher standards for buildings exposed to heavy snow and other climate hazards.
Modern societies became remarkably good at engineering around known risks.
Rivers were dammed. Embankments were raised. Storm drains were installed. Hillsides were reinforced. Weather satellites made typhoons visible days before landfall.
Insurance companies calculated probabilities from decades of historical losses. Governments drew flood maps based on historical rainfall. Engineers designed structures around what constituted a once-in-50-year or once-in-100-year event.
Climate change creates a fundamental problem for that system.
The past becomes a less reliable guide to the future. A "100-year" rainfall event makes considerably less sense as a planning benchmark if the underlying climate itself is changing.
Poor nations generally have fewer resources with which to protect themselves. Small island states face an existential threat from rising seas. Himalayan communities live beneath increasingly unstable ice. Countries already suffering water scarcity have little margin when drought intensifies.
It would therefore be wrong to pretend everyone carries the same risk. But wealth is not immunity.
Germany has experienced catastrophic flooding. Canada has battled enormous wildfires. Southern Europe has endured lethal heat. Switzerland has evacuated Alpine villages threatened by collapsing rock and ice.
Korea's considerable engineering capacity, sophisticated weather forecasting and disaster-response infrastructure give it advantages Nepal does not possess. They cannot make the peninsula climate-proof.
Perhaps the most important lesson from Nepal is therefore not that climate change produced one more terrible flood.
It is that the boundaries between different kinds of disaster are beginning to blur.
Heat can destabilize ice. Ice can destabilize rock. Rock can block rivers. Rivers can become floods. Floods can destroy power plants, roads and communications, making the next stage of the disaster harder to manage.
For Korea, the warning from the Himalayas should not be, "A mountain could fall on us."
The disaster we have prepared for may not be the disaster that comes next.
And in a rapidly changing climate, nowhere can afford to assume that yesterday's definition of safety will protect it tomorrow.
*The author is the managing editor of AJP
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