Disaster Psychology
Psychological Effects of Sudden Himalayan Floods
A PhD student seeks to help her home deal with disaster.
Posted April 16, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- Himalayan mountain villages experience sudden flash floods called Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs).
- GLOFs lead to severe psychological impacts — from disasters and from the stress of living with the threat.
- A Duke University PhD student is helping people to reduce the psychological impacts of GLOFs.
At any moment, a wall of water could blast down a mountain river, shattering bridges, ripping away houses, and sweeping away people. This is the traumatic reality facing thousands of people around the Himalayas, with major psychological consequences. PhD student Aaliya Aaliya, originally from Pakistan and now studying under Professor Brian McAdoo at Duke University in North Carolina, is helping.
Glacial Lake Outburst Floods
A Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, or GLOF, is exactly what the name says. It happens when a lake in a glacier suddenly bursts out, leading to a rapid, fast, large downstream flood.
The glacier’s ice can melt, releasing the water, or else glacier-related earthen embankments called moraines can collapse due to water infiltration or rainfall. Upstream melt can expand a lake, overtopping any barrier and damaging it. A GLOF can also be triggered by an earthquake; a landslide, rockfall, or avalanche into the lake; or a volcanic eruption underneath a glacier. The Icelandic word jökulhlaup is sometimes used to label GLOFs related to sudden melting in comparison to GLOFs related to a dam or dike failure.
Thousands of people have died in GLOFs from the Andes to the Alps. Currently, 15 million people are estimated to live in locations with acute risk of GLOFs, two-thirds of them at higher elevations around Asia, including the Himalayas. With glacial lakes increasing in number and size, partly as a result of glaciers melting due to human-caused climate change, negative psychological impacts are augmented due to the threat of and experience from GLOFs.
The never-ending awareness that a GLOF could wipe out one’s village, perhaps with little warning, produces stress and anxiety among many mountain populations. Sometimes, day-to-day life is said to be imbued with fatalism, perhaps underpinned by religion. This explanation tends to be too simplistic. Few people want themselves and those around them to die, nor do they accept sudden death as inevitable. Instead, it is the reality that they live in a place that could be inundated at any point. The fear persists without blocking everyday living, aspirations, hopes, and dreams. No choice exists except to get on with it.
Reducing Dangers and Psychological Impacts
Enter Aaliya. She grew up in a GLOF-susceptible mountain village called Hunza Valley in Pakistan and thanks her parents for supporting her education throughout her childhood. Following her first university degree in Bangladesh, she arrived at Duke University in late 2021 to start her doctorate.
She explains that, despite lacking any formal background in psychology, she works with mental health researchers at the University of Liverpool in the UK “to gain a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between climate change and mental health.” With human-caused climate change adding to the chance of GLOFs in the short term, she says “In the long term, I want to design culturally tailored interventions for communities in High Mountain Asia that are prone to multiple hazards”.
One example of such a community is her hometown. With close family still there, Aaliya remains directly connected to the daily stresses of living in a known floodplain. By finding out how to improve psychological resilience to the deluge that could strike at any time, she seeks interventions “to cope with daily stress, not just during times of disaster”.
One challenge of this research and application is overcoming resistance to dealing with the observed psychological consequences of living in GLOF-prone circumstances. “Mental well-being is a sensitive topic,” she explains, and “It is even more challenging to talk about mental health outcomes and lived experiences related to the loss of loved ones, properties, livelihood sources, and social networks due to hazards.”
To learn how to assist, her research focuses on collaborating with people in remote Himalayan villages in Nepal and her home country of Pakistan. She designs interviews and focus groups through discussions with the people and groups in order to understand what knowledge they have, what they need, and how to interpret it all for action.
Respecting local values, norms, interests, and approaches is paramount. It means being aware of past disaster experiences that still impact people psychologically, yet being a source of strength to create a better future.
And so, Aaliya concludes, she always remembers her goal that “the work I am doing here at Duke will in some way reduce their suffering.” In doing so, the family she saves might be her own.
References
Hewitt, K. and J. Liu. 2010. Ice-Dammed Lakes and Outburst Floods, Karakoram Himalaya: Historical Perspectives on Emerging Threats. Physical Geography, 31, 528-551.
Taylor, C., T.R. Robinson, S. Dunning, J.R. Carr, and M. Westoby. 2023. Glacial lake outburst floods threaten millions globally. Nature Communications, 14, article 487.
Ziegler, A.D., R.J. Wasson, Y. Sundriyal, P. Srivastava, G. Sasges, S.J. Ramchunder, C.E. Ong, S.K. Nepal, B.G. McAdoo, J. Gillen, D. Bishwokarma, A. Bhardwaj, and M. Apollo. 2023. A call for reducing tourism risk to environmental hazards in the Himalaya. Environmental Hazards, 22, 1, 1-28.
