A series of cloudbursts have devastated large parts across the HKH region in India this month, and earlier. Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim has tasted the fury of nature in earnest.
By Salam Rajesh
So, what’s up with the fragile Hindu Kush Himalaya region? Monsoon time this year looks like the worst period for the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas, impacting heavily on people, infrastructures, the land and the rivers.
Nature’s fury appears to have been unleashed left and right across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, with much provinces in Pakistan and in India bearing the brunt of the outflow of nature’s anger.
A series of cloudbursts have devastated large parts across the HKH region in India this month, and earlier. Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim has tasted the fury of nature in earnest.
Quite recently, India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav was in Kathmandu to attend a climate summit, and there he did admit that the Himalayan communities are under severe threat from the triple planetary crises, despite contributing little to the climate crisis. The minister called for regional cooperation to share knowledge and protect these fragile ecosystems.
Yadav’s call for regional level collective action to meet the Himalayan crises reflected the analysis of a study published in Cambridge University Press’ Journal of Glaciology which revealed troubling trends at Himachal Pradesh’s Gepang Gath glacier.
The threat comes from the rapid glacial retreat coupled with the expansion of its proglacial lake, a water body that forms at the front or side of a glacier and is typically dammed by moraine, glacial ice, or debris. Over the past six decades, this lake had grown nearly sixfold, from 0.2 sq km in 1962 to 1.2 sq km in 2023, according to the study.
Scientists from the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, under India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, undertook the study that linked the proglacial lake expansion directly to the Gepang Gath glacier’s retreat, and further accelerated by calving, that is, the breaking off of ice chunks from the glacier’s terminus.
Between 2014 and 2023, the Gepang Gath glacier retreated by 480m, resulting in substantial surface area loss and volume loss – 21.7 million cubic meters of ice – according to the study. The glacier’s mass balance had shown a consistently negative trend, indicating it was losing more mass than it gained in these past years.
The study highlighted a dangerous feedback loop, indicating that as the lake grew, its relatively warm water accelerated melting at the glacier’s edge, triggering further calving. To prevent disasters, the study called for urgent measures, including the establishment of early warning systems for the proglacial lake, and enhanced monitoring of glacier-lake dynamics.
Earlier this month, a significant cloudburst caused a furious flash flood in Jammu and Kashmir’s Chashoti area. This was at a point when the annual pilgrimage for the Machail Mata Yatra was being kick-started from the Chashoti area which was the starting point. What followed was confusion amidst the debris and the cries for help.
On the fifth of this month, a massive cloudburst in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi District unleashed a ferocity that had not been seen in years. Houses were swept away in a flash flood triggered by a cloudburst above the village of Dharali, killing several people and burying an entire village under slush, mud and boulders.
During 2023, a study undertaken in the HKH region in Arunachal Pradesh by researchers from the North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) in Itanagar, found evidence of glacial retreat across the Mago River Basin, Subansiri River Basin, and Dibang River Basin. This understandably indicated future scenario of changing dynamics in this part of the HKH region, with potential for cloudbursts and devastating flash floods in a future time.
Glaciers’ melt has a corresponding concern with sea level rise. For instance, along the coastline in Pakistan’s Indus delta, seawater is steadily making inroad into the land, making living almost impossible.
Earlier this year, it was reported that seawater intrusion into the delta, where the Indus River meets the Arabian Sea in the south of the country, had triggered the collapse of farming and the fishing communities, inducing outmigration of climate refugees in their own land.
Ironically, there are reports too of the ‘deaths’ of glaciers around the world. In 2014, the disappearance of Iceland’s Okjökull glacier is the first known case where a glacier was officially declared ‘dead’ as a result of human-caused climate change.
And in 2023, Iceland created the world’s first iceberg graveyard, where ice-like headstones were constructed for 15 major glaciers listed on the Global Glacier Casualty List, all of which are either dead or critically endangered. Perhaps, and sadly, by the way things are taking shape glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya will soon be in the list.
To make matters worse, a recent report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) forecasted that the annually averaged global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2025 and 2029 is predicted to be between 1.2 degrees Celsius and 1.9 degrees Celsius higher than the average over the years 1850-1900 (that is, the pre-industrial period).
Additionally, there is an 80 percent chance that at least one year between 2025 and 2029 will be warmer than the warmest year on record (currently held by 2024), and, there is an 86 percent chance that at least one year will be more than 1.5 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial level. The suggestion is dampening in its calculated predictions.
The report further indicated that there is a forecast 70 percent chance that the five-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is up from 47 percent in the 2024-2028 period assessment, and up from 32 percent in the 2023 report for the 2023-2027 period.
For the laymen, it has to be understood that every additional fraction of a degree of warming drives more harmful heat waves, extreme rainfall events, intense droughts, melting of ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers, heating of the ocean, and rising sea levels. These do not spell good tidings for humanity now and in the future, unless corrective measures are taken up post-haste.