Glacier threat in Pakistan
– Climate change is causing glaciers around the world to melt, raising the risk of flooding and other problems. But residents of a remote area of Pakistan face floods for the opposite reason – their glaciers are growing.
Experts say that more than 120 glaciers in Pakistan’s north are stable, or even growing rapidly, in a phenomenon called the “Karakoram Anomaly”.
A team of researchers from Britain’s Newcastle University last year attributed the anomaly to a summer “vortex” of cold air over the Karakoram mountain range.
They say this is causing the glaciers in the region to grow, in spite of a global increase in average temperatures.
One of the Karakoram glaciers provoking the greatest concern is Khurdopin, in the remote Shimshal Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, the country’s northernmost region. The glacier has been in a “surge” phase since May last year.
Experts from Focus Humanitarian Assistance, part of the Aga Khan Development Network in Pakistan, are now monitoring a large lake that formed last October when the glacier blocked the Shimshal River.
There are fears that the lake, now mostly frozen, could cause an outburst flood in the coming summer months.
Salmanuddin Shah, programme manager at Focus, said the glacier had grown by 1.7km since the surge began last year.
“We are monitoring the glacier on a daily basis through satellite imagery. When the temperature starts rising, we will visit the glacier for physical assessment,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We will get a clearer picture of how it will behave from this April onwards.”
It takes about three-and-a-half hours by jeep over a treacherous mountain road, only opened in 2004, to reach the Shimshal Valley after leaving the newly paved Karakoram Highway at the village of Passu.
The most famous local resident is Samina Baig, the first Pakistani woman to climb Mount Everest. Other than that, the four small villages in the Shimshal area stay mostly out of the news. Even glacier-related floods last August, which destroyed bridges and damaged roads, leaving the valley inaccessible for a week, barely received coverage. –