Credit: Photo by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, courtesy of The Ohio State University.
On July 17, more than 70 million tons of ice broke off from the Aru glacier in the mountains of western Tibet and tumbled into a valley below, taking the lives of nine nomadic yak herders living there. To perform a kind of forensic analysis of the avalanche, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences joined with glaciologists from The Ohio State University; They concluded that the cause of the avalanche was likely climate change.