It took only a few hours for this glacial flood to erode the entire riverbank that separated this home from the water!

Check it out:

Sad stuff.

That condo building next door barely hung on:

Water built up behind a glacier in the nearby Suicide Basin (what a name!) starting in May as the winter snows melted. The build up continued until this week, when the summer temperatures and pressure of the trapped water finally burst through the glacial wall and down into the Mendenhall River.

Suicide Basin has released these "Glacial Lake Outburst Floods" since 2011. You can read a scientific study about Suicide Basin that was published in 2020 right here.

This map/photo shows how tiny the entire city of Juneau is compared to the Mendenhall and Suicide Glaciers:

There are tens of thousands of such glaciers in Alaska.

My wife and I were there, exactly one year ago, standing on a boat watching house-sized chunks of ice fall a hundred feet into the ocean. Bald eagles, harbor seals, and humpback whales were minuscule next to the glaciers.

Juneau authorities say a total of eight structures were condemned (two of them homes) as a result of the flooding, with several others that may be totally lost.