A group of ten tourists survived a huge avalanche while exploring Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains — and one even managed to capture the harrowing experience on film. This is nothing short of a miracle.
Harry Shimmin, the Guinness world record holder for most backflips in one skydive, shared the horrific viral clip on Instagram.
“We’d just reached the highest point in the trek,” read the post. “While I was taking pictures I heard the sound of deep ice cracking behind me.”
The adventurers — a group that included one American — were incredibly lucky. According to Shimmin’s account, just a few extra minutes may have caused their deaths.
“The whole group was laughing and crying, happy to be alive,” the Instagram caption continued. “If we had walked five minutes further on our trek, we would all be dead.”
Nature seems to be quite on an aggressive roll at this time. Just last week, a glacier collapse in the Italian Alps killed at least seven and left several others wounded or missing — an incident that, like the one this weekend, was likely a result of glacier-depleting climate change.
Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Zhaparov is a vocal advocate for climate policy. Climate change presents a massive threat to glacier-laden mountain regions, and like Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan, he’s urging top polluters to stop overlooking impending climate disaster that his country may well face.
“The world is facing global climate change, which is fraught with dangerous consequences,” Zhaparov said in a June interview with The Independent. “This is especially true for us mountain countries because these problems are more dynamic and specific: glaciers melting and natural water reserves decreasing, which can lead to imminent disaster.”