Kathmandu, Aug 28: The death toll from flash floods in central Nepal rose to 469 on Friday, with more bodies recovered as search and rescue operations continued for the third day following the disaster.

In a statement, Nepal Police said the bodies were recovered from eight districts of the Himalayan nation.

According to the police, 178 dead bodies have been recovered from Chitwan, 110 from Nawalparasi East, 44 from Gorkha, 37 from Nuwakot and 33 from Dhading district.

Similarly, 28 bodies have been recovered from Tanahu, 27 from Nawalparasi West and 12 from Rasuwa.

So far, 1,545 injured and stranded people have been rescued from various affected regions. Among them, 84 are currently undergoing treatment in various hospitals in Kathmandu.

Search and rescue operations continued for the third day of the tragic incident with the mobilisation of 7,451 security personnel, including 2,391 Nepal Army personnel, the statement said.

An ice-rock avalanche triggered by a glacial collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border sent a torrent of water, mud and debris downstream through central Nepal on Wednesday, devastating towns and villages, washing away homes, vehicles, roads and bridges, and damaging hydropower projects.

Washington, Aug 28: As rescue teams searched Thursday for missing people following catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border, Earth scientists reviewed satellite imagery for clues to the cause and assessed the devastation.

The flooding killed hundreds of people in Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday. Many more are still missing, including scores of foreigners and pilgrims.

Geomorphologists Kristen Cook and Dan Shugar said initial images from Nepal on Wednesday were obscured by clouds and dust from the debris, so they could only see that part of a glacier had broken off from the Langtang Lirung peak, near the border with Tibet.

In clearer images from Thursday, they said they could see that the bedrock underneath the glacier had collapsed, taking the massive chunk of ice down with it and sending boulders and ice into the valley.

“It shows the whole area without anything hidden, and we could see that, yes, it looked like there was not only this glacier that had failed, but a much larger chunk of the bedrock of the mountainside itself that had given way,” said Shugar, associate professor at the University of Calgary. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it.”

Shugar said it’s heart-wrenching to look downstream from there on the images, to where people were living, and see how the debris has buried villages.

After slamming to the valley floor, the debris maintained its momentum through the steep, narrow valley as ice melted, said Cook, at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. Water and mud several stories high swept through communities.

The Trishuli River surged during the flooding. Before and after satellite images of the Kolpurtar, Betrawati and Syapru Besi areas of Nepal show that the river is now much wider, and brown and black, because it overtopped its banks in some areas and filled with debris in others. The change in the colour of the water shows how much sediment the flow was carrying, turning from greenish to very brown because it’s full of mud, Cook said.

Towns and villages that were devastated along the river banks are submerged in debris and mud. They appear as areas of brown. Some houses are still poking through in an image of the Betrawati area.

The flooding toppled and swept away buildings in Syapru Besi, a popular tourist spot where a famous trek to Langtang begins. In before and after images, a side river is now wider too, because the flow was so powerful it pushed upstream.

The flooding “left a wasteland in its wake” that will take many years to recover from, said Alton Byers, a mountain geographer at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Byers lived in Nepal and now travels there yearly to study glacial hazards and work with communities to prepare. This is the largest glacier flood he has seen, by far.

Byers, faculty research scientist at the university’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said he thinks Wednesday’s flooding is related to climate change. The Earth’s warming is melting glaciers and permafrost, causing instability and the breakage of massive amounts of snow and ice at high altitudes. That can be a catalyst for a series of cascading events, he said.

“All the indicators, to me, point to the impacts of warming trends,” he said. “In this case, the permafrost that for millennia has helped to hold together high-altitude rock and ice and soil and glaciers is now weakening and becoming unstable.”

Cook and Shugar said that at this point, they can’t say for sure there’s a direct link to climate change. Slopes fail and landslides happen, Cook said, though permafrost is melting and that is destabilizing mountainsides.

“While we cannot at this point directly link this collapse to climate change, it is not unexpected to see more events of this type with a warming climate,” Cook said. “Not this big, hopefully not this big.” KSI

The world’s first patient to undergo brain surgery with live artificial intelligence assistance has had his tumour successfully removed, the BBC reported.

Rhys Hibbert, a 48-year-old father of two from Bedfordshire, underwent the pioneering procedure at University College London Hospital. Surgeons said he could have lost his sight as the tumour was pressing on his optic nerves.

The AI system analysed a live video feed during the operation and identified the likely location of crucial blood vessels and nerves, helping surgeons determine the safest areas from which to remove the tumour.

Hibbert had an 11mm non-cancerous tumour on his pituitary gland, which sits close to the carotid arteries and optic nerves. His peripheral vision had begun to narrow, while he also suffered from fatigue and dizziness.

The operation was performed through the nose using an endoscope. The tumour was partly hidden behind bone and a tough membrane, making it difficult for surgeons to identify the safest route for removal.

The experimental AI tool, described as being similar to a “surgical ChatGPT”, tracked surgical instruments and highlighted important anatomical structures on a second screen in real time.

Prof Hani Marcus, one of the surgeons, said the system had been trained using hundreds of videos of pituitary tumour operations and could act as an “expert second pair of eyes”.

However, the surgeons retained full control of the procedure. The research team, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research and Google, now plans a larger clinical trial. Hibbert said his vision had improved significantly after the operation. “It’s given me my life back,” he told the BBC.