The full working record of this analysis, newest first.
Nothing is deleted. Five findings have been withdrawn and several more
corrected; all of them are still here with the date and the reason. If you
want the current state instead, that is on the
front page.
8 September 2026 — evening
The seventh version failed too, and we have stopped building
versions. A measurement of our own scoring is the reason. The
floodplain version ran: four hundred combinations, none passing. It did what
the video said it should — the depth at Galchhi is now right in seventy runs
where it was fifty before, and the flood covers the valley floor at about
the rate the clip shows — but the failure split in two rather than closing.
The dry runs now reach Galchhi at the right depth and the town
below it on time, which no previous version managed, and pay for it by
leaving four times more rock behind than satellites measured. The wet runs
leave the right amount of rock and stand five metres too deep at Galchhi.
What stopped the work was not that. It was a check we had never run:
comparing the model's water depth against the mud lines at every one of the
eleven hundred points along the river, rather than as six reach averages.
The one run that has ever passed all eleven tests matches the mud
lines at eleven per cent of the points in the first twenty-two
kilometres. It satisfies every average while being wrong at most
places inside them. Six of the eleven tests are reach averages of a profile
we reconstructed ourselves, so the scoring was too coarse to pin the model
down — and seven versions of failure look less like a search that has not
converged and more like a question that was not answerable as posed.
So the model is being split in two, which is Dave's idea and the
right one. The first twenty-two kilometres are a rock-and-ice avalanche in a
confined gorge, with almost no river to sweep up and a hard measurement to
hit — the border camera's seven minutes forty. Everything below the junction
is a flood wave on a monsoon river, which does not carry its own water but
gathers the river's as it goes. Those are different problems with different
physics, and joining them at a single handover — the shape of the flood as
it passes the junction — lets each be tested on its own instead of one being
blamed for the other's failure. The first experiment needs no avalanche
model at all: is there any shape of flood at the junction that can
be routed down the river we measured? If the answer is no, that is a real
result about our reconstruction or about the lower river's physics, and we
will publish it as one. Finding 04 stays under revision, and may end
up withdrawn rather than resolved. Plan §11; dossier §27–28.
8 September 2026 — midday
The first academic reconstruction of this collapse has appeared, it
agrees with our geometry, and its source area makes our volume an ordinary
one. And a figure we went chasing turned into a correction of ours.
A preprint posted this month (arXiv 2609.04563) reconstructs the collapse
from open data. It deliberately publishes no volume, no velocities and no
dynamic model, on the stated grounds that one would add false precision
without a source volume, material fractions and a hydrograph. Two of its
numbers bear on us. It measures the straight line from where the mountain
broke away to where the debris stopped at 8.84° below horizontal; we had
8.76°, from our own map, path and choice of crown and toe. That ratio is a
measurement of the physics — for anything sliding to rest it is the friction
— so the agreement says our geometry is sound, which matters because every
speed here is a distance over a time along that same line. It is a simple
measurement on similar public data, so agreement is close to what one should
expect: it validates the foundation, not the building, and nothing about our
volume or our model. Second, it maps the source area at 1.009 square
kilometres. Spread our 110–175 million cubic metres over that and the slab
that detached was 109–173 metres thick; Chamoli 2021 was about 135 by the
same arithmetic. So the number that has read as uncomfortably large all week
is, as a piece of mountain, unremarkable — the first independent constraint
pointing that way, and it arrives from a study that took care not to estimate
a volume at all. Detail, including the boulder-size velocity check that
agrees with our gorge window, is in report §04b.
The correction. Our literature search picked up a
figure — an "additional flood volume" of 19.96 million cubic metres — and for
a few hours we treated it as a new constraint on the size of the collapse.
Then we went to the source, and found it already in our own data folder,
downloaded on 2 September: a two-page press release in Nepali from the Flood
Forecasting Division, issued the day after the flood. It says the volume
above base flow measured at Devghat, between 14:10 and 18:00,
is preliminarily estimated at approximately 2 crore cubic metres —
20 million, one significant figure. That is the extra water past one gauge
inside a stated four-hour window, not a measurement of the whole flood, and
it cannot be set against a release volume. The two-decimal version we had
been working from is not in it. Our technical report has had this right since
it was first published; the mistake was ours, made by working from a summary
of a document we already held. We have transcribed and translated the release
in full so anyone can read it rather than take our word for it. What the
figure can do is fix how wide the wave was at Devghat, which no
version of this model has ever been tested on, and that is now a test.
The same release records a magnitude 2.6 event near the border at
08:20 and the main one at 08:37 — a precursor seventeen minutes ahead.
Chinese researchers have separately reported unusual signals at about 06:04,
06:50 and 08:15. Two independent records now point at a mountain that may
have failed in stages, where every version of our model has assumed a single
release. Nothing here changes a finding. Dossier §26.
8 September 2026 — early morning
The first run to pass every test — and why it is not the answer.
Then a video that shows what the answer is. A second-stage sample
inside the region the night's best runs bracketed produced, for the first
time, one run of three hundred that meets all eleven tests. Our rule is that
every passing run is then checked against three measurements it was never
scored on, the arrival times at Malekhu and Kalikhola and the peak at
Devghat, and this one fails all three: forty minutes late, two and a half
hours late, and half the peak. It is a hundred and sixty million cubic
metres with almost no water in it, a stiff, slow mass that reaches Galchhi
at the right depth by crawling. The runs that get the downstream timing
right are the wetter ones, and every one of them is too deep at Galchhi.
So the model can be right at Galchhi or right below it, never both, and
that is a statement about what the model lacks, not about the flood. Dave
found the missing piece on YouTube: a clip shot from a hillside above a
broad farmed valley on the Trishuli. At the start the river is a braided
gravel channel perhaps a hundred and fifty metres wide. Seventy seconds
after the front appears, the flow has left the channel and covers the
entire valley floor, several hundred metres across, to the houses at its
edge, and it stays there, moving slowly, for the rest of the clip. Our
mud-line map has the same event in it, unread until tonight: the water
depth halves at kilometre ninety, exactly where the elevation model shows
the valley floor opening from two hundred and fifty metres to six hundred.
A flood that spreads over a floor like that becomes long, low and slow at
once, which is what the record downstream shows and what a single channel
cannot do. The next version gives the lower river its floor, with the
water allowed to move across it, and is argued for in dossier §25. The
location of the video is not yet pinned; a large mid-channel boulder and a
cable crossing in the first frames should fix it. Six versions, one pass,
none promoted. Finding 04 unchanged: under revision, moving up. Dossier
§24–25; output/ensemble_v10b_RESULTS.md.
7 September 2026 — night
Fifth version, three hundred runs, none pass — and the upper
corridor is now solved in the model. What is left is the lower river.
Dave asked whether our limits were wrong, or whether there was a
non-linearity we did not understand. Both, as it turned out, and the answer
is in dossier §23. Three limits were wrong and none of them were being
sampled: the collapse had been fed into the valley over a fixed three
minutes in every version, an assumption standing in for a seismic duration
nobody has published, and it acts directly on the border clock; the
dry-friction floor sat above the values ice gives; and the deposit limit is
a measurement of rock, from elevation models made days after the event,
that had been applied to ice as well. With those three moved — release
duration sampled up to ten minutes, ice-capable friction, deposition scored
on rock alone — fourteen runs now meet the border clock and the gorge depth
together where the previous version managed one, three runs meet ten of
the eleven tests, and the two best fail on exactly one thing: too much
water at Galchhi, eighty-five kilometres downstream. The non-linearity is
that every limit on the flood's speed in this model grows with the square
root of its depth, so volume, valley width, composition, drag, deposition
and the clock are one coupled system rather than six dials, and the search
had been walking its boundary on assumptions it was never allowed to vary.
The remaining conflict discriminates cleanly: wet releases put fourteen to
nineteen metres at Galchhi and arrive at Malekhu half an hour to an hour
early, dry ones put one to seven metres there and arrive late or not at all.
The answer is between them, and a single 267-metre channel cannot produce
it in a valley the site table puts at five hundred. Next: the lower river's
floodplain, from the elevation model, as the gorge and the Lhende were done
before it. Where the model is converging, stated as the shape of a search
and not a finding: 110 to 175 million cubic metres, mostly ice and water,
released over five to ten minutes. Finding 04 unchanged: under revision,
moving up. Dossier §23; output/ensemble_v10_RESULTS.md.
7 September 2026 — evening
A fourth version, and the failure has moved again — this time onto a
measurement, not the model. The afternoon's result was that one drag
setting could not serve the gorge and the lower river at once. So the drag
was made to follow the flow's composition, which the model already tracks:
full drag for a rock-and-ice mass, none for water, and a mud-rich flow keeps
its drag because it is still a debris flow. Zero of two hundred again, and
the reason is instructive. The runs that carry the drag are the ones that
start with little water in them, and in this model such a flow lays down
fifty to sixty million cubic metres of solids along the corridor, against a
measured twelve, and then stalls in the flatter river below Betrawati. The
wet runs pass the deposit limit and keep Galchhi in range, but have no drag,
and are back to running the gorge like water. One run is worth naming: a
hundred and thirty million cubic metres, three-quarters water at the moment
of detachment, with a wide upper valley and weak drag. It matches every
measured depth except Galchhi, the gorge speed, the scour volume, and the
three downstream numbers it was never scored on — the fronts at Malekhu and
Kalikhola and the peak at Devghat — within five to fifteen per cent. It
fails the border clock by six seconds, Galchhi by six metres, and the
deposit limit by ten million cubic metres. Not a pass; the shape of one.
Which points at the limit itself. The model counts unmelted ice as solid,
and the twelve million cubic metres comes from elevation models made three
to six days after the event, by which time any ice laid down in the corridor
had melted. The limit is on rock, and it has been applied to the ice as
well. Next, for a decision: score deposition on rock alone. Four versions,
none passing, all pointing the same way. Finding 04 unchanged: under
revision, moving up. Dossier §22; output/ensemble_v9_RESULTS.md.
7 September 2026 — afternoon
Two more versions of the size test, and the failure has moved to a
more interesting place. The midday result said a release deep enough
to leave the mud lines runs the gorge as a frictionless bore. So the model
was given a turbulent-drag term of the kind used for rock–ice avalanches, as
a sampled input alongside the others, and the loss at the border junction
was fitted rather than assumed. On the deepest near-miss that fixed the gorge
speed at once and did nothing to the clock — and the reason turned out to be
above the junction, not in it. The model's Lhende valley was 50 metres wide,
a rule of thumb; the mud-line map has it at 95 to 190 metres over the ten
kilometres above the border. In a 50 m channel a hundred-million-cubic-metre
release runs two hundred metres thick, and at that depth every limit on its
speed scales with the square root of the depth. So a third version added
the mapped width as a sampled input. Both versions still pass nothing — zero
of two hundred, twice — but the pair the midday run could never produce at
any size, the mapped gorge depth and the border clock together, now exists:
six runs, all a hundred million cubic metres or more. What one drag
coefficient cannot do is serve the gorge and the lower river at once. Sized
for a seventy-metre debris flow it stalls the muddy flood below Betrawati;
sized for the lower river it leaves the gorge too fast. The nearest miss, a
hundred million cubic metres with the gorge's drag, reaches Malekhu and
Kalikhola within five to ten per cent of the observed times without being
scored on them, and fails only by putting sixteen metres of water at Galchhi
where the gauge saw nine. Next, and it is Dave's decision, not the
session's: make the drag depend on how much rock the flow is carrying, which
the model already tracks, so the gorge and the lower river stop asking for
different physics. Finding 04 is unchanged: under revision, moving up. Also
found and logged: a text-versus-number slip in the width filter of the
midday run that kept the sharpest imagery out of it; it moves widths by less
than a third and nothing in the midday diagnosis depended on it. Dossier
§21; output/ensemble_v7_RESULTS.md and _v8_.
7 September 2026 — midday
The size envelope was re-run against the mud-line map, and nothing
passes — which is the most useful result this project has had. Two
hundred releases from one to two hundred million cubic metres, scored on the
corridor's mapped water depths for the first time, with the measured channel
widths, the Chinese arm as the pond the map found, the corrected clock and a
speed compared like with like. Not one satisfies the depths and the border
clock together, at any size. The runs deep enough to leave the mud lines are
86–142 million cubic metres, three to five times the envelope on this page —
and every one of them reaches the border in 4.2–4.8 minutes at 45–62 m/s
where the record says 7 min 40 s and about 34. The runs that make the clock
never put more than 31 m of water in a gorge whose mud lines stand at 60 to
100. Roughness does not bridge it: at seventy metres of depth the model's
friction all but vanishes and a big release runs as a water bore at the
Froude limit, while the real flow was that deep and half as fast. So the
structure is wrong, not the numbers: a debris flow this deep carries a
resistance the composition dial does not have. The measured widths, for the
record, are one and a half to three times wider than the rule of
thumb, which kills the long-standing excuse for the low stages. Next: add a
turbulent-drag coefficient to the friction law as a seventh sampled input
and re-score, because the volume and the rheology now have to come out
together. Finding 04 stays where it is: under revision, moving up. Dossier
§20; output/ensemble_v6_RESULTS.md.
7 September 2026 — morning
Every mud line in the corridor, mapped from imagery plus the
terrain. The stripped-ground boundary was extracted from Sentinel-2
and from Planet's 0.55 m Pelican scenes along both banks at every
100 m from the scar to Betrawati and 6 km up the Chinese arm, and
sampled on the 8 m High Mountain Asia DEM (fetched this morning; the
30 m DEM put geopera's 134 m cliff 90 m lower at the same
point). It was gated first at the border: the method returns the three mud
lines Dave measured there — bed 1,815, lee line 1,875, impact cliff
1,920–1,930 m — as 1,814–1,818, 1,866–1,878 and 1,917 m, each
±5 m, and geopera's 134 m maximum turns out to be the same wall.
Then Hakubesi, where it reads ~85 m above the pre-event bed
where the helicopter stills had given 45–70 and geopera's own points give
75–107, so the stills were the low read and the passing runs' 5–21 m are
4–17× short. Then Syabrubesi, where the velocity collapse geopera reported
reproduces as 12–15 m/s at their station. Along the whole gorge the
stage is 62–72 m median with both banks valid at 127 of 128 stations;
bend pairs give 37–47 m/s where they pass a Froude and error grade,
and peak discharges of order 300–400 thousand m³/s. The one thing
that moved: up the Chinese arm the mud line is level at
~1,875 m for 2.5 km — the lee line, not the 1,925 m contour the
up-valley volume route used — and a pond at that level holds
23 Mm³ (15–33), with the widths the sub-metre imagery showed; the
170–690 Mm³ corners of that route go with it, and its best corner now
sits inside or at the top of the 13–34 envelope. Coverage, flags,
per-point errors and the CC-BY-NC handling are in dossier §19 and
output/trimlines.csv. Nothing promoted: the profile is the
observable set for the ensemble rerun, which is the next job.
Late morning: the whole 200 km, and a fit. Dave
looked at the junction plan view with the Pelican image under the contours
and called the highest points on the Nepal-side wall as cloud shadow; they
are now a named override, and the image-plus-contours plot is a tool anyone
can run on any box. The map was then extended to Devghat with a second
Sentinel-2 mosaic and a third 8 m tile, and a robust running fit
(±1 km median, outliers beyond 2.5 MAD marked rather than averaged)
put through 1,228 bank points, rejecting 80. Stage falls from 73 m in
the gorge to 29 above Betrawati, 15 between Betrawati and Galchhi, and
7.4 m [4.7–9.9] at Galchhi against the gauge's +9 m.
Below Mugling the method mostly finds the pre-event gravel margin rather
than a mud line — 606 of 665 bank points show no change — so the last
50 km carry only 56 clean points and are reported as such. Dossier
§19a; output/trimline_fit.csv.
6 September 2026 — night
A third cold read, this one aimed at the dependencies rather than
the prose, and it found that this morning's correction never reached the
code. The 6 September clock fix — 6 min 50 s to
7 min 40 s — was applied to the hero stats, the clocks table, the
findings and the plain-English page, and to no model constant at all. Six
code files were still scoring against 7.0 minutes, which means the
14–34 Mm³ envelope had been computed against a number this site had
publicly retracted eight hours earlier. Fixed in all six and both ensembles
rerun. The envelope barely moves — 13.3–34.0 Mm³, median
23.2, from 21 of 200 — and the smallness of that change is the
reassuring part, not the interesting one. The interesting part is that a
retraction is not finished when the pages read right.
The CAS re-score, promised on three pages for five days, was
run. Scored against the peer-reviewed 19 m/s instead of the
45–52 superelevation band, nothing survives — 0 of 200. The
conflict is not about size: no release anywhere between 1 and
200 Mm³ can satisfy the border arrival and a 19 m/s border speed at
once, and none can satisfy the Syabrubesi arrival with it either. Each is
reachable on its own. That is consistent with our argument that CAS measures
the post-turn water surface rather than the front, and equally consistent
with our speed-to-arrival physics being wrong; it does not choose between
them. Both scorings are now published rather than one asserted.
The profile-integrity check the Seti post-mortem called for
on 3 September had never been built. It exists now, it gates rather
than warns, and it audits the profile the model actually consumes rather than
the intermediate — a distinction that matters, because its first draft
reported the live Trishuli channel as failing and was itself wrong. Seti as
published fails all four gates; the repaired Seti channel still
fails one. The Trishuli lower river does turn into a staircase under the
monotone clamp — 82% of the last 39 km at zero gradient — but the
smoothing that follows removes it, so the elevations are cleared and the
Galchhi stage failure now points squarely at the channel widths,
which below km 60 are a rule of thumb rather than a measurement.
On the Chinese arm, from the routing side. Modelling
the Kyirong arm as a backwater wedge rather than a linear store and sweeping
release volume against wetness, no combination reproduces the Galchhi rise
and the border clock together. The nearest miss —
60 Mm³ at 40% liquid — clears Galchhi at 10.6 m and arrives at the
border eight seconds too early. Under this morning's superseded
7.0-minute clock it would have passed. That is a structural result about the
store, not a size, and it points the same way as the up-valley volume route
above: up. Nothing promoted.
Also on this page: the confidence chips now have a legend, the FFD's
20 Mm³ is cited where it is used rather than referred to, the
not-peer-reviewed disclosure has moved from the last finding to above the
first one, geopera's independence is described as what it is — a different
solver over shared inputs — and finding 02 now says which end of its
seven-minute clock has actually been audited. It is the camera. The seismic
origin at the other end is a catalogue solution taken on trust.
6 September 2026 — late
A new, loose line of evidence on the collapse size, and it leans
larger. Dave Hume's method: treat the border junction as a node,
measure the volume that ran up the Chinese arm from the valley floor and the
imagery, split it at the node by the valley geometry, and subtract what the
Lhende contributed. On the Copernicus 30 m DEM the arm held somewhere
between 13 and 70 million cubic metres at peak depending on how the mud-line
head is read. The share that went up the arm is the crux, and the valley
geometry cannot fix it: the Lhende's last 500 metres bend toward the
downstream exit, the kilometre above runs at right angles to both exits, and
a 100-metre-deep flow at 170 km/h does not follow a 500-metre bend.
Anywhere from a tenth to a half is defensible. Divide one by the other and
the corners straddle finding 04's envelope: one lands inside it, the next at
its top, and most well above. It is a first pass with an unmeasured split
and a 30-metre DEM, so it cannot move the finding, but it leans larger and
it is recorded here rather than held back. What would fix the split is
peak-discharge continuity at the junction — mud lines and superelevation
just above and just below it, which helicopter footage can supply — and the
tool for that is built. Working in the dossier (§17); what
would tighten it is listed in report §13.
Later the same night, a second line pointing the same way. Helicopter
stills of the Upper Trishuli-1 headworks reach, 21 km below the
junction, show a mud line roughly 45–70 m above the pre-event river bed
— read four ways without imagery: a tunnel portal as a ruler, the deposit
benches, geopera's measured bed rise of 11–18 m there, and the road ledge
from the map and the DEM. The runs that pass our size envelope put 5 to
21 m of flow at that spot. No stage anywhere in the corridor has ever
been one of the observables the envelope was scored against; the next
version will score them, and the envelope is likely to move up when it does.
Dossier §18.
6 September 2026 — evening
A second cold read, an account of the event, and a rethink of the
first 22 kilometres. The technical report now opens with a
description of what happened — what fell, from where, onto what, what the
border camera saw, where the deposits are, what the mud lines record, and
what nobody yet knows — and the plain-English page carries the same account
in plain words. The video measurement listed below is written up in full on
both pages: the clock, the two-route camera calibration, the two sight lines
50 m apart that the front crossed in 1.066 s, the error budget and
what failed, with a plan-view diagram of the geometry.
The up-valley question has an answer. Re-measuring the Sentinel-2
change along the river centreline instead of in wedges, the ground stripped
up the Chinese arm fades out between about 2 and 3.5 km from the
junction, while the two arms the flood flowed through stay stripped for the
whole 5–8 km in view. With Xinhua's "about 3 km" of damaged highway
the 3.5 km contour trace, and — found in tonight's literature check —
China's Ministry of Natural Resources' own statement that part of the flow
ran "nearly 3 km upstream in the Gyirong Tsangpo", four lines now put
the surge about 3 km up the valley toward Gyirong. Sub-metre imagery
shows fresh sediment to about 4.6 km, which may be ponding behind the
junction plug rather than the surge; the report keeps both. Report §08.
Dave Hume asked whether the first 22 km carried much water at
all. They did not: the Lhende held about half a million cubic metres against
a collapse of 14–34 million, so what struck the border was at least
four-fifths mountain — a rock–ice avalanche, not yet a flood. The run down the
Lhende is what an ice-rich mass does on its own, and the physics is the
physics of an ice skate: a premelted film at rest, and at avalanche speeds
frictional melting that renews a lubricating film at millimetres per second
for a few per cent of the fall's energy — lubrication, not water production.
Kolka–Karmadon 2002 covered a similar distance in a similar time. This is
written up as report §04b and on the plain page; it reframes finding 02
without moving it, and it locates finding 01 below the junction, where the
22 Mm³ of river was. Not a scored result, so it is here and not in the
findings.
Corrections from the cold read: §01 of the report still said "six
minutes and fifty seconds"; the plain page's cliff box still compared the
mud-line speed with the old 52 m/s clock and called it a match "within a
few per cent" (it is within ~15% of the corrected 47.8); its opening still
carried a toll ten days old; "only something running like slush" and "wall
of water" both claimed more than the evidence shows; the version numbers
disagreed between pages. And the word "survivors", which this site had been
using for the model runs that pass its tests, is gone. It should never have
been used that way here.
6 September 2026
We stopped taking anyone's word for the border camera, and it cost us
a number. Until today the timestamp that the composition finding
rests on reached us only through a partisan outlet's account of what the
overlay said. We obtained the footage and read it directly: the station's own
clock is legible and tracks real time. That retires the awkward part of the
argument — and corrects our own figure. The destruction begins at 10:59:50
Beijing, 08:44:50 in Nepal, which is 7 min 40 s
after the collapse and not the 6 min 50 s we had
published. Ours came from reading the overlay to the minute and assuming zero
seconds. The 22-kilometre average front speed drops from 53.7 to
47.8 m/s — 12% slower. The finding stands: seventeen and
twenty-three minutes are still excluded, the corrected 7 min 40 s
lies inside the ±30% tolerance the composition test used, and the Syabrubesi
gauge still carries the argument without any camera at all. The runs
themselves had not been repeated at the corrected clock when this was
written; they were, later that night — see the entry above.
Also corrected: this site claimed the contact stress between ice
grains collapses the melting point by about 70 °C. It does not. That was
a straight-line extrapolation past the point where ordinary ice stops
existing; the real floor is about 22 °C, and beyond it the high-pressure
forms of ice melt hotter, not colder. The mechanism is premelting —
a liquid-like film that is there without being squeezed — which is why you can
skate at −30 °C. The conclusion it supported is unchanged.
Not promoted to the findings above, per the rule below: a first direct
measurement of the flood front's speed at the border, taken off the video
against two surveyed sight lines. 47 m/s, envelope
41–63. It agrees with the corrected clock and with geopera's
superelevation, and it excludes the one published figure for the
post-turn water — which is evidence that those two numbers were
never measuring the same thing. It is a day old and needs checking; the
method is now written up in report §03 and on the plain page.
5 September 2026 — evening
A cold read of the whole site, and the corrections it produced.
Three of them matter. The melt ceiling was quoted as sitting "far below" the
official 20 Mm³ while this site's own chart showed 15 against 20; carrying
finding 04's size envelope into the energy budget — which should have happened
the moment that envelope existed — puts the real ceiling at 1.1–2.5 Mm³ and
makes the claim both true and much stronger. A bar on the plain-English chart
labelled "river already lying in the channel, 47 Mm³" was the
total wave at Devghat; the standing channel water is 22.4. And the
border-clock resolution was presented with more confidence than its sources
carry: the decisive overlay quote comes from a partisan outlet and Kargel's
matching figure has no stated method, both of which are now on the page. Also:
the published workings had fallen three days behind the findings and have been
rebuilt; every page now says who geopera is; and the human toll is at the top
of this page, where it should have been from the first version.
A rule, adopted here rather than just intended: nothing
reaches this findings list on the day it is computed. New results go in this
changelog first and move up only after they have survived a night and one
out-of-sample check. Findings 04 and 05 were promoted the same day they were
produced, which is how finding 03 got promoted and then withdrawn.
5 September 2026
Two new findings. The collapse was probably 14–34 million cubic metres, an
order of magnitude below the largest published estimates. And the model was
proved structurally wrong before it was fixed — no combination of inputs could
satisfy the timing and the debris budget together until sediment was split
into coarse and fine. A challenge to the border clock was chased
down and resolved in the camera's favour. The Nepali translation was withdrawn
pending review by a Nepali speaker.
3 September 2026 — night
The Seti 2012 result is withdrawn. Building the missing
erosion physics meant looking hard at channel gradients, and that exposed a
bad channel profile underneath the Seti test: straight lines flown across a
mountain rim, then flattened to zero slope by the routine meant to clean
them. Rerun on a corrected channel, the test fails, and its second
conclusion reverses. Nothing about the Trishuli findings depends on it.
Meanwhile the erosion term now exists, and it puts the amount of material
the flood tore out of the Langtang corridor within range of what satellite
stereo actually measured — while saying the corridor cannot have received
anything like the amount of rock the largest source estimates imply.
3 September 2026 — evening
A deposition figure that geopera had themselves retracted was corrected in
our scoring, which resolved a tension between the timing and deposit
evidence — both now point the same way.
3 September 2026
The Chamoli 2021 timing gap closed by adding thermal lag to the melt physics.
The corridor map was redrawn with automatic label placement.
2 September 2026
First public version: the water budget, the snowplow model and the
river-as-circuit routing model.