The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...
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Climate threat worse than earlier feared
The latest UN environment report based on about 400 major peer-reviewed scientific studies over three years has warned that the threat of climate change could be much worse than predicted earlier. The UNEP Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 report warns that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries. (See salient features and links below) It says that the...
More »Beating Retreat by Darryl D’Monte
It does seem that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh chose an inopportune time — the eve of the crucial UN climate negotiations — to endorse the findings by a retired scientist that Himalayan glaciers have not been ‘retreating’ any faster than they have been for the past century. The study by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, has apparently not been peer-reviewed. No less...
More »Of receding glaciers and lack of benchmark data of Meena Menon
From Leh, the 40-km drive to Khardungla, the highest motorable pass in the world at 18,380 feet, winds gently through mountains coated with thick snow. To the left of the pass the Ladakhis swear is the Khardung glacier which has retreated, though there is no study to confirm it. In fact, Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a leading glaciologist and a senior fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) who...
More »Why are the Himalayan glaciers melting?
The BBC's Chris Morris travels to the main source of the Ganges river to find out why the glaciers are melting. As the first light of dawn lit up the snow-covered mountain peaks, we trekked through a barren landscape 4,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, heading for the Gangotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges. About 2km from our destination, we passed a rock inscribed with the...
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