Growing glaciers prove cold comfort for Pakistan’s Shimshal valley
Rina Saeed Khan
7 Min Read
ISLAMABAD (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - 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, program manager at FOCUS, said the glacier had grown by 1.7km (about 1 mile) 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.”
REMOTE RISK
It takes around 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 in the national press.
But Pakistan has reason to pay attention to Shimshal, because the Khurdopin glacier is known for causing periodic glacial outburst floods that have led to massive destruction downstream.
The Shimshal River meets up with the Hunza River, which in turn feeds the Indus, the country’s most essential waterway.
When the approximately 47-km-long (30-mile) Khurdopin glacier collides with the side wall of the rocky valley, it blocks the river, and a temporary lake forms behind it as the water piles up.
The lake expands for several months and then can burst through the blockage as the glacier retreats again.
By January of this year, the lake was already about 1.5km (1 mile) in length.
Experts say that in the past, millions of cubic feet of lake water have rushed into the Hunza River, destroying everything along the way.
According to local people, these lake outbursts floods have happened several times – in 1920, 1942 and in the early 1960s. There was also a smaller amount of flooding last July.
“Our elders still remember those earlier massive floods,” said Karamat Ali, a documentary film-maker who lives downstream in Karimabad. He hiked up to the frozen lake in Shimshal last December.
“It has become huge and it is very dangerous indeed, both to Shimshal Valley residents who live close to the river and those living downstream,” Ali said in a telephone interview.
Scientists studying the Khurdopin glacier using satellite imagery have confirmed that it is moving at a rapid pace.
A study by Utrecht University reported that during a few weeks in 2017 the glacier’s velocity peaked at the equivalent of 5 km a year, among the fastest rates reported globally.
PREPARING FOR DISASTER
The situation has the local people, FOCUS and the province’s Disaster Management Authority worried. No one knows for sure if there will be a high-intensity outburst and when it might happen. All are preparing for flooding, whether it’s small-scale or much larger.
Ghulam Rasul, head of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, who viewed the glacial lake from a helicopter last December, estimates that it is at 70 percent of its capacity, with no inflows at the moment, but that it will fill up further as ice begins to melt around the end of March.
“In mid-March, inflows will start increasing. In April it will reach a high-risk position. In my opinion the lake will flow over the ice or make a channel for itself through the ice. I don’t expect a sudden outburst,” Rasul said.
Communities living downstream are not taking any chances. With the help of FOCUS they have set up an early warning system using satellite images and cellular phones.
A monitoring team trained by geologists regularly hikes up to the glacier to gather data.
Community response teams have also been set up to respond to disaster alerts and help evacuate people if needed. They are trained in first aid and equipped with tents, blankets and rescue tools.
“The awareness-raising sessions and emergency response drills at the community level have made us learn about hazards and the immediate steps we need to take as first responders, so women and children in our village feel much safer than they did a few years ago,” said 39-year-old Zeenat, a resident of Shimshal village.
Rasul said that, contrary to appearances, climate change is in fact responsible for an increase in the frequency of the glacier surges.
Scientists say unusual warming in the Arctic may be linked to more winter storms further south.
Rasul, however, believes that the “Karakoram Anomaly” will not last long.
“As temperatures rise further, even these glaciers’ mass balance will gradually reduce as the freezing level is moving upwards,” he said.
In the meantime, however, residents of the Shimshal valley are keeping a watchful eye on their glacier – and the frozen lake behind it.
=====================================================
Surging Glacier Creates a New Lake
April 1, 2019
JPEG
While most Himalayan glaciers are retreating, about
200 in the Karakoram Range are doing the opposite. Scientific and military authorities in Pakistan are monitoring one of them closely due to the potential for flooding.
About 1 percent of the world’s glaciers surge.
These glaciers cycle through periods when they abruptly flow several times faster than usual. At peak speeds, surging glaciers can advance several meters per day—fast enough to block streams, bulldoze trees, crash into roads, and damage infrastructure. Surges typically last for a few months (and sometimes several years), and are then followed by a period of little or no movement that can last for a decade or longer.
One surging glacier in northern Pakistan sits near Mount Shishpar (also Shisparé or Shishper), a 7,611-meter peak in the Hunza District. In April 2018, the debris-covered glacier started to accelerate, with certain parts moving as fast as 13 to 18 meters (43 to 59 feet) per day. Since the surge started, the front of Shishpar Glacier has advanced by about 1 kilometer. As the
ice pushed south past an adjacent valley, it blocked a meltwater stream flowing from the neighboring Muchuhar Glacier. By autumn 2018, the water had pooled up and formed a sizable lake.
April 5, 2018
JPEG
April 1, 2019
JPEG
These images, acquired by the
Operational Land Imager (OLI) on
Landsat 8, show the position of the glacier and lake on April 1, 2019 (right), compared to April 5, 2018. The ice appears gray because dust, soil, and other debris are piled on top of it.
Generally, ice-dammed lakes like this are unstable and do not last for more than one season; most drain slowly and do not to cause any problems. But sometimes the ice dams collapse suddenly or lake water spills over the dam, causing fast-moving, dangerous floods. Because of this, scientists are conducting frequent ground surveys near Shishpar and analyzing satellite imagery daily.
In a
release on April 27, the Gilgit-Baltistan Disaster Management Authority indicated that the risk of a damaging flood had decreased due to falling lake levels. In an
earlier release, the group noted that hot weather in the summer could cause rapid melting and hazardous overflows, and they outlined several steps to reduce the risk of a flood disaster in communities downstream. In the case of a severe flood, a nearby section of the Karakoram Highway, large numbers of homes in the village of Hasanabad, important irrigation channels, and two power plants could all be affected.
The glacier’s surge has already had some consequences. One nearby power station went offline due to a lack of incoming water. Also, a key pathway that miners and cattle once used to cross the glacier safely became impassable. In August 2018, that change trapped cattle in summer pastures and prevented miners from reaching a work site, the
Pamir Times reported.
This is not the first time that this glacier has surged.
Field research and analysis of satellite imagery indicate that Shishpar also surged in 1904-1905, 1972-1976, and 1993-2002.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland, with information from Jeff Kargel (Planetary Science Institute), Cameron Watson (University of Arizona), Andreas Kääb (University of Oslo), and Umesh Haritashya (University of Dayton).
===================================================
Pakistan's Glaciers are also growing in size in some spots. The Karakorum's act like the "worlds third pole" due to their topology.
