Video shows Arctic glacier calving, not trigger for catastrophic Nepal-Tibet floods
After a glacial collapse triggered deadly flash floods that swept away entire settlements on the Nepal-Tibet border in August 2026, an old video showing chunks of ice breaking away from a glacier was shared in social media posts claiming it showed what triggered the disaster. The video was previously shared a month before the tragedy in Nepal, and the person who filmed it told AFP he shot the footage in Norway's Svalbard archipelago in 2018.
"Glaciers collapsed, triggering the disaster that devastated Nepal and claimed thousands of lives," says the Burmese-language caption of a Facebook video shared on August 28, 2026.
The video appears to show several clips of ice chunks breaking away from a glacier and falling into a body of water.
Screenshot of false Facebook post taken on September 2, 2026, with a red X added by AFP
The same video was also shared in similar Facebook posts after a high-altitude glacial collapse sent a huge wave of freezing water , rocks and debris that smashed into settlements and multiple hydropower dams in Nepal and China's Tibet region on August 26 ( archived link ).
At least 1,200 people were killed and more than 4,750 remain missing ( archived link ). Rescuers are still searching for survivors and the dead, while helicopters ferry food and medicine to those left with nothing.
Nepal's foreign minister told AFP on September 1 that the disaster was a "warning signal" of the growing risks climate change poses to the Himalayan nation ( archived link ).
While the exact cause of the glacial collapse is unclear, climate change is causing glaciers to melt worldwide, increasing the risk of such disasters.
The circulating footage, however, does not show the glacial collapse that precipitated the flash floods in Nepal.
A combination of reverse image searches using keyframes from the falsely shared video and a keyword search using the watermark visible in the video's bottom-right corner led to the same footage uploaded to a verified Facebook page on July 22 -- more than a month before the disaster at the Nepal-Tibet border ( archived link ).
The page belongs to Richard Sidey, a conservation, adventure and wildlife filmmaker.
The footage shared on July 22 is captioned: "3 mins of tidewater glaciers calving into the sea, filmed in Svalbard and Alaska. The final calving is the largest I have personally seen and filmed."
Screenshot comparison of falsely shared video (L) and the original video uploaded by Richard Sidey
He also shared the montage on his YouTube channel in February 2021, and an unedited version of a sheet of ice calving into the sea elsewhere on Facebook (archived here and here ).
Sidey told AFP he filmed the clips at the Monacobreen glacier in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean, during the summer of 2018.
"This glacier is a tidewater glacier, which is shown calving into the sea," he said in a September 2 email.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the flash floods in Nepal.
