On Tuesday morning, the death toll due to the last week's flash flood along the border between Nepal and China rose over 1,000, and continues to rise. Nepal's disaster management agency says it has confirmed 987 deaths in its own country and 16 deaths on the border with Tibet. Almost 4,400 people are missing. About 12,000 have been extracted alive. In Chitwan district bodies are being buried in mass graves as no time and in some cases, no means can be found to identify them individually. Workers are still in very difficult conditions, trapped in hydropower tunnels as the water surged through them, and China's Ministry of Water Resources has issued a new warning of possibly more glacier remnants above a crater near the source area coming down.

Heavy monsoon rains were a factor in causing this, but it wasn't just that. The US Geological Survey has linked it to a quake of magnitude 5.2 that was triggered by the collapse of a lower part of the Langtang Lirung glacier, which was recorded on seismometers in Europe. Looking at the satellite pictures, a geoscientist who examined them said the scar they had left resembled a mountain side that had been "bladed. That collapse caused a wall of debris, ice and water to roll down a 72-kilometre of the Trishuli River, flattening the Gyirong border checkpoint and wiping out whole village clusters in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading and even carrying human remains as far as 240 kilometres downstream into India.

None of this was really too much to ask for and this is certainly in line with scientists' frustration for the last 20 years who have been following the Himalayan range. This is a young, tectonically active mountain system, that continues to rise, continues to lose rock, and now heats up faster than average. For years, the study of the region's paleo-seismic activity has led researchers to believe that these mountains are inherently unstable and that stacking roads, tunnels, dams and townships on top of unstable slopes increases the risks of catastrophe, and not just trouble with infrastructure.

This warning has now been reinforced, after a team of 60 Indian scientists wrote to the government requesting a halt to further hydropower development in the Ganga basin and along the Himalayan arc in 2021. It was largely ignored. So had three hydropower projects been lashed in the year by flooding and landslides one of which, destroyed by the Chamoli incident, claimed 250 lives. The Nepal tragedy that has occurred last week is not new. It's just been increasing in size with every rep.

It is the extent of the exposure in the larger Hindu Kush Himalayan region that should be of concern to policy makers far outside Kathmandu. Some 15 million people live within 50 kilometres of a glacial lake in Nepal with the potential for a catastrophic outburst, with comparable risk exposed in the Andes and the European Alps, but concentrated most strongly in South Asia, according to research cited by mountain-development institutions in Nepal.

Permafrost is melting, slopes are moving that were previously held together by frozen ground are now becoming loose, and glacial lakes are expanding behind moraines that were never designed to accommodate today's meltwater. In the region, one glaciologist simply put the speed of change into perspective: the change that used to happen over centuries is now happening over years, and that's not fast enough for infrastructure planning cycles, let alone communities.

The economic exposure is as bleak as the human one. The finance minister of the Himalayan nation has estimated the reconstruction costs at $4-$5 billion, equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the country's national output, in a nation whose economy grew at a dismal 2.3 percent this fiscal year, compared with a robust 4.6 percent growth rate a year ago, according to the World Bank. Hydropower for Nepal accounts for more than 12 percent of its generating capacity; somewhere between 360 and 700 megawatts, depending on which agency's numbers you prefer, were offline one morning.

That's not a rounding error for a power-starved, remittance-reliant economy: Kathmandu is said to be negotiating replacement electricity with India, as its stations lie mired in silt. A separate estimate by the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure estimated that some 124 billion dollars' worth of Nepali infrastructure is exposed to this kind of disaster risk due to climate change, which is far larger than the country's GDP.

This moment is unique because it's the first time in history that climate stresses, seismic stresses, and a continuous 20-year construction boom have all occurred in a mountain range that geologically speaking was never built to bear this kind of load. Each new disaster conjures up the same litany of responses: improve early-warning systems, exchange data across borders with Nepal, China and India; have multiple backups in power lines so that a tunnel failure doesn't leave a district in the dark; and, most of all, say no to construction on areas where terrain is saying no. Engineers now say the quest to make everything flood-proof is the wrong objective make systems fail safely, with alternate ways to get through, backup power, backup insurance that way, communities will recover quickly instead of buildings that never bend.

The downbeat news is that the Himalayas have been warning of this eventuality with a predictable series of glacial bursts, cloudbursts and landslides since 2013 at Kedarnath, then at Chamoli in 2021 and now at Uttarakhand. The reaction each time has been empathy, commitments to funding and a pledge to “build back better” and then an increase in the same construction speed when the news moves on. The mountains, however, keep count in a different way. They don't forget and their "between reminders" is growing shorter over time.