From imploding glaciers to landslides, floods and torrential downpours, natural disasters have been happening one after the other in the Himalayas in recent times, making life in the mountains seem more vulnerable than ever before.

These unsettling episodes have made news by leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.  But a yet bigger disaster is in the making — invisibly so because it involves a tectonic shifting of plates deep within the earth at 5cm a year. The outcome is expected to be a devastating earthquake on a scale the Himalayan region hasn’t witnessed since 1950.