The Himalayas Are in Even Worse Shape Than We Thought
A new study published this week in Science Advances offers one of the most comprehensive views of what’s happening to the glaciers in the Himalayas—and what it means for the people who live below them.
The study, led by Joshua Maurer, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, analyzed 40 years worth of satellite images of around 650 glaciers across more than 1,200 miles of India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan. One of the largest ice loss studies to date (in both area and timespan), it not only confirms that climate change is the main contributing factor to glacial retreat in high-mountain Asia, but also reveals how fast rising temperatures are changing the face of the planet. According to the study, glaciers in the region have been losing the equivalent of more than a vertical foot and a half of ice each year since the turn of the millennia—which is twice the rate of melting between 1975 to 2000.
“Probably the most surprising thing [we found] would be the fact that we see such a similar amount of glacier melting across such a large and climatically complex region,” says Maurer. “That highlights the fact that there’s an overarching climate force affecting all these glaciers similarly.”
In recent years, that’s looked like an average of 8 billion tons of water per year—equal to 3.2 million Olympic-size swimming pools—flowing out of the region, which presents a couple of new problems: first, too much water, and then not enough. According to Maurer, as meltwater increases, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), or catastrophic bursts of overflow from previously contained glacial meltwater, will start to be a serious threat. (One GLOF in Bhutan killed 21 people in 1994. Nepal’s Imja Tsho, a glacial lake in the Khumbu Valley, was subject to an emergency draining in 2016 to reduce flood risk.) Then, as the glaciers continue to retreat, the water they provide to nearly 2 billion people is projected to dwindle, and, eventually, disappear.
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