Deep in the Himalayas, the disappearance of glaciers is threatening the kingdom of Bhutan. Anjali Nayar trekked through the mountains to see how the country is adapting to a warming world. Retreating glaciers Bhutan Himalaya. They are very beautiful and has a clear sign of slowly melting due to global warming. Easily visible are the ends of most of these glacial valleys’ surfaces turning to water to form lakes, a trend which has been noticed only in the last few decades.

By Anjali Nayar …Glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating faster than in any other part of the world and they could disappear completely by 2035 (ref. 1). This puts the mountainous nation of Bhutan at a special risk. In an area smaller than Switzerland, it has 983 glaciers and 2,794 glacial lakes, some of which have burst to produce deadly glacial lake floods. … The sounds of global warming are deafening at Thorthormi glacier. Every few minutes, a block of ice rips off the glacier and crashes into the lake in a trail of dust and ice. These are some of the tallest mountains in the world and form Bhutan’s northern boundary with Tibet. To get a look at the hazard posed by the melting glacier, Karma Toeb, the project’s glaciologist and team leader, scrambles to the top of a moraine — a steep ridge of loose, angular boulders built up by the glacier as it pushes debris along its edges. This moraine is a dam between two bodies of water (see map). To the east, Toeb points out how several slushy grey-brown ponds have formed on top of the Thorthormi glacier. To the west lies a much larger lake called Rapstreng — vast and milky green — about 80 metres lower in elevation. Toeb first came to this site in 1997, during a project to shrink Rapstreng lake. Over three years, a thousand labourers widened and deepened Rapstreng’s natural outlet to lower the lake by 4 metres. At the time, nobody was worried about the Thorthormi glacier next door. “Thorthormi was almost pure ice,” says Toeb. “We could cross over and walk on the glacier to do our research.” The glacial lake didn’t even appear in an exhaustive study of the region’s dangerous lakes in 2001 by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), based in Kathmandu, Nepal2,3. It is only within the past decade that researchers realized that Thorthormi could pose a threat. Thorthormi’s ponds were expanding and merging to form larger bodies of water. The changes have been dramatic even in the past few months. “Just before we started our work here in July this year, that part of the lake was water,” says Toeb, pointing down to a number of icebergs. “The ice blocks have been breaking off the mother glacier upstream.” …

Climate: When the ice melts