For the People of Gyirong: A Message of Condolence and a Call to Protect Our Shared Home

For the People of Gyirong: A Message of Condolence and a Call to Protect Our Shared Home On 26 August 2026, a glacier broke high in the Himalaya and sent a wall of ice, rock and mud down the mountain. By the time it stopped, it had taken lives on both sides of the border — in Nepal and in China — and left thousands of families waiting for word of the people they love. We write this not as a company, but as people. To every family who has lost someone, and to every person still waiting: we are deeply, truly sorry. We mourn with you Numbers cannot hold grief, but we owe it to those lost to say plainly what has happened. On the Chinese side, at Gyirong Port, 16 people were confirmed dead and 546 were reported missing as of 29–30 August. Across the border, in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, the national disaster authority reported 987 dead and 3,916 missing on 1 September, and the toll was still rising. Every one of those figures is a person — a parent, a child, a neighbour, a colleague, a friend. We cannot know the weight these families are carrying, and we will not pretend to. We only want to say: we see it, and we are with you. May those who have passed rest in peace, and may those still missing be found safe. What happened Shortly before 10:52 on the morning of 26 August, a glacier on the south slope of Langtang Lirung, in Nepal, broke away at an altitude of around 5,200 metres. The collapse fell roughly 1,200 metres to about 4,000 metres, scouring the mountainside into a vast debris flow. In six or seven minutes it travelled about 22 kilometres and reached Gyirong Port, in Gyirong County of Xigazê — the Tibet Autonomous Region of China — at about 1,800 metres. Around 0.7 square kilometres were flattened: 27 buildings and the facilities around them. Six minutes. That is the number that stays with us. A place that took a generation to build was changed in six minutes. We are small before nature This was not a failure of engineering, and it was not a failure of the people who lived and worked there. It was a reminder of something humbling: before the forces of nature, we are very small. The mountain, the ice and the river move on scales, and on timescales, far beyond us. Awe — not arrogance — is the only honest response to a world this large. Our task has never been to conquer nature. It is to live within it, carefully, and to care for the home that cares for us. The ice is retreating Painful as it is, this single event belongs to a larger story that scientists have been tracing for decades. Glaciers are far more than frozen scenery. They are reservoirs — freshwater stored high in the mountains and released slowly through the year. China alone holds 46,298 glaciers covering about 59,000 square kilometres and storing 5,590 cubic kilometres of ice; their melt feeds roughly a fifth of the country’s inland river water on average. In Switzerland, glaciers are called the “water tower of Europe”, because the Rhine and the Rhône rise in the Alps and carry their water to millions of people far downstream. That reservoir is shrinking. Between the 1960s and 2020, China’s glacier area shrank by about a quarter. In the Himalaya the loss is accelerating — the rate of ice loss has roughly doubled since 2000, and researchers now warn that parts of the Himalayan cryosphere are approaching a point of no return. Switzerland has lost close to 40% of its glacier volume since 2000, and nearly a quarter of it in the last decade alone. There is a quieter loss too. Glacial ice is a kind of memory. Snow falls, layer upon layer, and slowly presses old air, dust and water into a record of the climate of past centuries. As the ice melts, that record disappears. One study published this year estimated that Europe’s glaciers have already lost around 47% of the past climate information they once held. We are losing, in real time, the very evidence we need to understand what is happening to our world. What each of us can do We do not write to lecture. We write because grief, if we let it, can turn into care. The message of the ice is simple: the Earth is our shared home, and it is asking us to be gentler with it. Protecting the environment and living sustainably are not grand, distant ideas. They begin with each of us, and with small things — using less, wasting less, choosing responsibly, and asking the companies we buy from, and the ones we work in, to do the same. For those of us who make things, that also means taking our own footprint seriously: less waste, cleaner energy, and ways of working that give back rather than only take. No single person, and no single company, can stop a glacier from melting. But many small choices, made by many people over many years, are the only force that ever has. That is what “sustainable” really means — not a slogan, but a way of living that lets the next generation inherit a world that is still whole. To the families of Gyirong and of Rasuwa: you are in our thoughts. To everyone reading this: may we all hold a little more respect for the natural world that sustains us, and a little more resolve to protect it. — The Nex-G team Sources and coverage: Casualty figures and the description of the 26 August 2026 glacier collapse and debris flow at Gyirong Port are drawn from Chinese and international reporting dated 27 August to 1 September 2026 (CCTV, CGTN and Xinhua, and wire coverage by Reuters, AP and AFP). Figures for the Chinese side (16 dead, 546 missing) are as reported on 29–30 August 2026; figures for Nepal (987 dead, 3,916 missing) are as reported by Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority on 1 September 2026. Both sets of figures are provisional and were still rising as the search continued. Glacier statistics — China’s 46,298 glaciers, ~59,000 km², 5,590 km³, ~20% of inland river water, and ~26% area loss from the 1960s to 2020 — come from the Chinese glacier inventory and related scientific summaries; the doubling of Himalayan ice loss since 2000, and the warning that parts of the Himalayan cryosphere are approaching irreversible retreat, come from 2026 reporting. Swiss figures (nearly 40% volume loss since 2000; the “water tower” role; roughly 47% of past climate information lost) come from Swiss glacier-monitoring research summarised in the same reporting. These sources were not independently re-verified for this message; they are reproduced in good faith to honour those affected and to state the wider context plainly.