What happened in Nepal, and why it reaches our shelves

On 26 August 2026, a rock wall on Langtang Lirung gave way. Around two square kilometres of rock and glacier ice broke loose at 5,150 metres and fell fourteen hundred metres to the valley floor. The impact released as much energy as a magnitude 5.5 earthquake. Seismographs first registered it as one. 

Friction melted the ice on the way down. What started as rock and ice became water, mud and boulders. It reached the Rasuwagadhi border crossing, twenty-two kilometres downstream, in seven minutes.

What caused it
Ask whether climate change caused this avalanche and you will not get a straight answer. The researchers will not give one, and they are right not to. This mountain has been unstable for a long time. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook it in 2015 and probably weakened the rock for years
afterwards.

Ask instead what is happening to these mountains, and the answer is blunt.
Glaciers in the region are losing more than half a metre of thickness every year. Since 2010 the Langtang Lirung glacier has been retreating two to four times faster than it did over the previous two centuries. The freezing line is climbing about a hundred metres per decade. Ice that held cracks in the rock together is thawing. Where snow used to fall, rain falls now, and runs straight into those cracks.

July and August were about one and a half degrees warmer than they would have been without human-caused warming. Across the year it is closer to two. In some winter months, three. So the slope was always fragile. We are heating the thing that was holding it together. And there is no warning system that beats seven minutes. Nepal has early warning for river floods. It works, it has saved lives, and it was built for a different kind of event. The researchers say plainly that this one was past the limits of what adaptation can do, and that the only real way to lower the odds on the next one is to burn less.

That is the part worth sitting with. Not that a mountain came down. That we know why it is getting more likely, and that the answer is not a better alarm.

Why this reaches our shelves
Since 2019, BeYoona has worked with Nepalese craftswomen who make their products by hand, in small numbers, for fair wages. We have been selling their work for years.
That is the part that makes this specific rather than abstract. A country in the headlines is one thing. The people whose work fills our shelves is another.

What we are doing
Meet the mouse. The little face of our fundraiser. Each one is made by hand in Nepal, by the community this is for.
Ten euro. Every cent to Nepal.
Come by the shop and pick one up.