Nepal Glaciers Shrink By Quarter In 30 Years

Climate crisis has caused Nepal 's Himalayan glaciers to shrink by nearly a quarter in just over 30 years, said a scientist.

The glacier loss raises the risk of natural disasters in the ecologically fragile region.

A new study by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) shows that the area covered by glaciers has decreased by 24 per cent between 1977 and 2010.

Samjwal Ratna Bajracharya, lead author of the report, said “the shrinking of glaciers in Nepal is definitely connected to climate change; glacial melt is a huge indicator of rising temperatures.”

Under the three-year study led by ICIMOD scientists mapped satellite imagery from several decades to find the extent of ice loss in the region.

The fastest decline occurred between 1980 and 1990, said Bajracharya. Prior to the late 1970s, satellite imagery reflected little change in Nepal 's glacial area.

He said the glacial melting is creating huge, expanding lakes that threaten to burst and devastate mountain communities living downstream.

The accelerated glacial loss raises concerns over future access to water resources, particularly in regions where groundwater is limited and monsoon rains are erratic.

“If the trend continues, the immediate impact will be felt by those living in high-altitude regions, which are dependent on freshwater reserves from glaciers,” said Bajracharya.

The findings also sound alarm bells for Nepal 's push to develop hydropower projects.

“ Nepal cannot use its water resources to develop the country without assessing the state of our glaciers and river basins,” he said.

A government report in India recently blamed hydropower projects for devastating floods last year that killed thousands in India and Nepal .

The government panel said the build up of sediment in rivers, due to the dumping of soil that was dug up during construction of hydropower projects, exacerbated flooding when record-high rainfall hit the region last June.

It should be mentioned that the Himalayan region abounds in glaciers. Most of the big glaciers lie in the eastern Himalayas .

As the western Himalayas receive only a small amount of rainfall, barring the formation of vast snowfields, the source of some of the big rivers of Nepal are in fact glaciers.

Nepal 's largest glacier lies in the Mahalangur and the Kumbhakarna ranges. Khumbu is the biggest glacier and Langtang the longest. Kanchenjunga , Yalung, Nupchu and Langtang are some other glaciers belonging to the eastern Himalayas . Tukche and Hidden valley glaciers belong to the central Himalayas but these are comparatively small.

The Khumbu glacier is situated between Mount Everest and the Lhotse-Nuptse Ridge. It is seen flowing down between the two mountains and swerving right through the Khumbu valley. The terrain is gray and rocky. More

 

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Water Wars in Asia?

The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. And the battles of tomorrow may be over water.

Nowhere is the danger greater than in Asia. Drought, urbanization, pollution, and inadequate infrastructure have made Asia the world’s most water-scarce continent on a per-capita basis. Many of its water sources cross national boundaries, creating the potential for international conflict as supplies dwindle. Now global warming is raising the stakes further, causing rising sea levels, more severe floods and droughts, and the melting of the glaciers in the Tibetan plateau.

The water security challenges facing China and India in particular have consequences not just for the two rising powers, but for Asia as a whole. They threaten to reduce economic growth across the region, exacerbate ongoing territorial disputes, and impose further hardships on Asia’s poor. Asia Society Northern California is pleased to host national security expertBrahma Chellaney, water expert Peter Gleick, and futurist Peter Schwartz to discuss what is becoming Asia’s defining crisis of the 21st century.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Dehli. He has written six books on international relations and geopolitics, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground, which won the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award in 2012. His newest book, Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Crisis, has just been released.

Peter Gleick is Co-founder and President of the Pacific Institute. Dr. Gleick is the author of many scientific papers and nine books on water, including The World’s Water and Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. He is the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, among other awards.

Peter Schwartz (moderator), a renowned futurist, is Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning at Salesforce.com. He was Co-founder and Chairman of Global Business Network (GBN).

Copies of Water: Asia's New Battleground and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis will be available for purchase and signing!

Promotional co-sponsors: The Asia Foundation, East Meets West, Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, Japan Policy Research Institute, Pacific Institute, Sierra Club, US China Green Energy Council, World Affairs Council

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Program Agenda:

5:30-6:00 pm: Registration
6:00-7:30 pm: Discussion and Audience Q&A
7:30-8:00 pm: Reception and Book Signing

EVENT DETAILS

5 June 2013

6:00pm - 7:30pm

Asia Society
Bechtel Conference Room
500 Washington St.
San Francisco

Click for Directions

$10 Asia Society/Co-sponsor members/students; $15 non-members

BUY TICKETS »

 

Stimson Environmental Security program Releasing New South Asia Water Report

For people in the Washington, DC area, next week Stimson hopes you can join their Environmental Security Program on Wednesday March 20th from 10 am-12 pm as we release a new report on transboundary water management and climate change impacts in South Asia, entitled Connecting the Drops: An Indus Basin Roadmap for Cross-Border Water Research, Data Sharing, and Policy Coordination.

The event will feature David Michel (Director of the Stimson Environmental Security Program), Winston Yu (Senior Water Resources Specialist for South Asia at the World Bank), and Satu Limaye (Director of the East-West Center). Please join us for a discussion of the current state of India-Pakistan water relations and new potential pathways for water collaboration between the two countries. You can RSVP by clicking the link in the formal invitation below, or by following this link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1tPeXvZLpLnfcudKQLtikWNBQnrh3mdnw7nTxWJe2u5Y/viewform

Please feel free to forward this invitation to interested colleagues. Thank you, and we look forward to welcoming you to Stimson.

Best,

Russell Sticklor

Stimson Environmental Security Program

Stimson's Environmental Security Program invites you to the publication launch of: Connecting the Drops: An Indus Basin Roadmap for Cross-Border Water Research, Data Sharing, and Policy Coordination featuring David Michel Director, Environmental Security Program, Stimson Winston Yu Senior Water Resources Specialist for South Asia, World Bank Satu Limaye Director, East-West Center Wednesday, March 20, 2013 10 AM – 12 PM Stimson Center 1111 19th Street NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 RSVP HERE Decision makers in India and Pakistan will have to overcome a host of overlapping socio-economic, environmental, and political pressures as they endeavor to fulfill their countries’ future water needs and peacefully manage the Indus River Basin that both countries share. Increasingly subject to soaring demand, unsustainable consumption patterns, and mounting environmental stresses, almost all of the basin’s renewable water resources are already allocated for various uses — with little to no spare capacity. Scientific and policy collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries will be essential to providing decision makers with better understanding of the multiple risks weighing on the Indus Basin and the consequent water resource challenges and choices facing the riparian nations. The Stimson Center, in coordination with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (Pakistan) and the Observer Research Foundation (India), is pleased to announce the release of a new report, Connecting the Drops: An Indus Basin Roadmap for Cross-Border Water Research, Data Sharing, and Policy Coordination. The report results from a Track II diplomatic initiative that brought together leading Indian and Pakistani scientists, diplomats, water policy analysts and practitioners to analyze emerging stresses on the countries’ shared water resources and identify best practices for cooperative knowledge building and sustainable water management in the Indus Basin. Please join us for a briefing on the report’s recommendations and a panel discussion of cross-border water management challenges and opportunities in South Asia. Copies of the report will be available, and the event will be open to the media.

 

Rains or Not, India Is Falling Short on Drinkable Water

CHERRAPUNJI, India — Almost no place on Earth gets more rain than this small hill town. Nearly 40 feet falls every year — more than 12 times what Seattle gets. Storms often drop more than a foot a day. The monsoon is epic.

But during the dry season from November through March, many in this corner of India struggle to find water. Some are forced to walk long distances to fill jugs in springs or streams. Taps in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya State, spout water for just a few hours a day. And when it arrives, the water is often not drinkable.

That people in one of the rainiest places on the planet struggle to get potable water is emblematic of the profound water challenges that India faces. Every year, about 600,000 Indian children die because of diarrhea or pneumonia, often caused by toxic water and poor hygiene, according to Unicef.

Half of the water supply in rural areas, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, is routinely contaminated with toxic bacteria. Employment in manufacturing in India has declined in recent years, and a prime reason may be the difficulty companies face getting water.

And India’s water problems are likely to worsen. A report that McKinsey & Company helped to write predicted that India would need to double its water-generation capacity by the year 2030 to meet the demands of its surging population.

A separate analysis concluded that groundwater supplies in many of India’s cities — including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai — are declining at such a rapid rate that they may run dry within a few years.

The water situation in Gurgaon, the new mega-city south of Delhi, became so acute last year that a judge ordered a halt to new construction until projects could prove they were using recycled water instead of groundwater.

On Feb. 28, India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, proposed providing $2.8 billion to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the coming fiscal year, a 17 percent increase.

But water experts describe this as very little in a country where more than 100 million people scrounge for water from unimproved sources.

Some water problems stem from India’s difficult geography. Vast parts of the country are arid, and India has just 4 percent of the world’s fresh water shared among 16 percent of its people.

But the country’s struggle to provide water security to the 2.6 million residents of Meghalaya, blessed with more rain than almost any place, shows that the problems are not all environmental.

Arphisha lives in Sohrarim, a village in Meghalaya, and she must walk a mile during the dry season to the local spring, a trip she makes four to five times a day. Sometimes her husband fetches water in the morning, but mostly the task is left to her. Indeed, fetching water is mostly women’s work in India.

On a recent day, Arphisha, who has only one name, took the family laundry to the spring, which is a pipe set in a cement abutment. While her 2-year-old son, Kevinson, played nearby, Arphisha beat clothes on a cement and stone platform in front of the spring. Her home has electricity several hours a day and heat from a coal stove. But there is no running water. When it rains, she uses a barrel to capture runoff from her roof.

“It’s nice having the sunshine now, but my life is much easier during the monsoon,” she said.

Kevinson interrupted her work by bringing her an empty plastic bottle. “Water,” he said. Arphisha bent down, filled the bottle and gave it back to him. “Say, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. “Say, ‘Thank you.’ ” When he silently drank, turned and went back to playing, Arphisha laughed and shrugged her shoulders. More

 

Pacific Northwest and Himalayas Could Experience Major Earthquakes, Geophysicists Say

Dec. 4, 2012 — Research by Stanford scientists focuses on geologic features and activity in the Himalayas and Pacific Northwest that could mean those areas are primed for major earthquakes.

A big one in the Himalayas

The Himalayan range was formed, and remains currently active, due to the collision of the Indian and Asian continental plates. Scientists have known for some time that India is subducting under Asia, and have recently begun studying the complexity of this volatile collision zone in greater detail, particularly the fault that separates the two plates, the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT).

Previous observations had indicated a relatively uniform fault plane that dipped a few degrees to the north. To produce a clearer picture of the fault, Warren Caldwell, a geophysics doctoral student at Stanford, has analyzed seismic data from 20 seismometers deployed for two years across the Himalayas by colleagues at the National Geophysical Research Institute of India.

The data imaged a thrust dipping a gentle two to four degrees northward, as has been previously inferred, but also revealed a segment of the thrust that dips more steeply (15 degrees downward) for 20 kilometers. Such a ramp has been postulated to be a nucleation point for massive earthquakes in the Himalaya.

Although Caldwell emphasized that his research focuses on imaging the fault, not on predicting earthquakes, he noted that the MHT has historically been responsible for a magnitude 8 to 9 earthquake every several hundred years.

"What we're observing doesn't bear on where we are in the earthquake cycle, but it has implications in predicting earthquake magnitude," Caldwell said. "From our imaging, the ramp location is a bit farther north than has been previously observed, which would create a larger rupture width and a larger magnitude earthquake."

Caldwell will present a poster detailing the research on Dec. 4 at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Caldwell's adviser, geophysics Professor Simon Klemperer, added that recent detections of magma and water around the MHT indicate which segments of the thrust will rupture during an earthquake.

"We think that the big thrust vault will probably rupture southward to the Earth's surface, but we don't expect significant rupture north of there," Klemperer said. The findings are important for creating risk assessments and disaster plans for the heavily populated cities in the region.

Klemperer spoke about the evolution of geophysical studies of the Himalayas Dec. 3 at the same meeting in San Francisco.

Measuring small tremors in the Pacific Northwest

The Cascadia subduction zone, which stretches from northern California to Vancouver Island, has not experienced a major seismic event since it ruptured in 1700, an 8.7-9.2 magnitude earthquake that shook the region and created a tsunami that reached Japan. And while many geophysicists believe the fault is due for a similar scale event, the relative lack of any earthquake data in the Pacific Northwest makes it difficult to predict how ground motion from a future event would propagate in the Cascadia area, which runs through Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.

Stanford postdoctoral scholar Annemarie Baltay will present research on how measurements of small seismic tremors in the region can be utilized to determine how ground motion from larger events might behave. Baltay's research involves measuring low amplitude tectonic tremor that occurs 30 kilometers below Earth's surface, at the intersections of tectonic plates, roughly over the course of a month each year.

By analyzing how the tremor signal decays along and away from the Cascadia subduction zone, Baltay can calculate how ground motion activity from a larger earthquake will dissipate. An important application of the work will be to help inform new construction how best to mitigate damage should a large earthquake strike.

"We can't predict when an earthquake will occur, but we can try to be very prepared for them," Baltay said. "Looking at these episodic tremor events can help us constrain what the ground motion might be like in a certain place during an earthquake."

Though Baltay has focused on the Cascadia subduction zone, she said that the technique could be applied in areas of high earthquake risk around the world, such as Alaska and Japan. More

 

More Serious Earthquakes Predicted in the Himalayas

Dec. 28, 2012 — A research team led by scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has discovered that massive earthquakes in the range of 8 to 8.5 magnitudes on the Richter scale have left clear ground scars in the central Himalayas.

This ground-breaking discovery has huge implications for the area along the front of the Himalayan Mountains, given that the region has a population density similar to that of New York City.

NTU Professor Paul Tapponnier, who is recognised as a leading scientist in the field of neotectonics, said that the existence of such devastating quakes in the past means that quakes of the same magnitude could happen again in the region in future, especially in areas which have yet to have their surface broken by a temblor.

Published recently in Nature Geosciences, the study by NTU's Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) in Singapore and colleagues in Nepal and France, showed that in 1255 and 1934, two great earthquakes ruptured the surface of the earth in the Himalayas. This runs contrary to what scientists have previously thought.

Massive earthquakes are not unknown in the Himalayas, as quakes in 1897, 1905, 1934 and 1950 all had magnitudes between 7.8 and 8.9, each causing tremendous damage. But they were previously thought not to have broken the earth's surface -- classified as blind quakes -- which are much more difficult to track.

However, Prof Tapponnier said that by combining new high resolution imagery and state of the art dating techniques, they could show that the 1934 earthquake did indeed rupture the surface, breaking the ground over a length of more than 150 kilometres, essentially south of the part of the range that harbours Mt Everest.

This break formed along the main fault in Nepal that currently marks the boundary between the Indian and Asian tectonic plates -- also known as the Main Frontal Thrust (MFT) fault.

Using radiocarbon dating of offset river sediments and collapsed hill-slope deposits, the research team managed to separate several episodes of tectonic movement on this major fault and pin the dates of the two quakes, about 7 centuries apart.

"The significance of this finding is that earthquakes of magnitude 8 to 8.5 may return at most twice per millennium on this stretch of the fault, which allows for a better assessment of the risk they pose to the surrounding communities," said Prof Tapponnier.

Prof Tapponnier warns that the long interval between the two recently discovered earthquake ruptures does not mean people should be complacent, thinking that there is still time before the next major earthquake happens in the region.

"This does not imply that the next mega-earthquake in the Himalayas will occur many centuries from now because we still do not know enough about adjacent segments of the MFT Mega-thrust," Prof Tapponier explains.

"But it does suggest that areas west or east of the 1934 Nepal ground rupture are now at greater risk of a major earthquake, since there are little or no records of when last earth shattering temblor happened in those two areas."

The next step for Prof Tapponnier and his EOS scientists is to uncover the full extent of such fault ruptures, which will then allow them to build a more comprehensive model of earthquake hazard along the Himalayan front. More

 

Pakistan's climate change challenge

Last month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan's environmental insecurity.

Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as "the world's highest waste dump." Much of this waste-generated from soldiers' food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan's chief water source.

Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan's environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan's annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan's United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan's land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh's environment minister said that millions of people across the province face "acute environmental threats."

Pakistan's environmental insecurity is not merely a matter of nasty weather. In three specific ways, it also threatens the country's fragile stability.

The last two years have provided ample proof of Pakistan's climate-change vulnerability. According to climatologists, the devastating floods of 2010-which submerged a fifth of the country and displaced millions-constituted "the worst natural disaster to date attributable to climate change" (a judgment rendered in 2010). They argued that a combination of high temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and lower ones in the Pacific "created the perfect conditions" for the deluge.

The floods' destructiveness was exacerbated by Pakistan's rampant deforestation. UN data andPakistani media reports paint an alarming picture of this emissions-releasing scourge: Pakistan suffers from the highest annual rate of deforestation in Asia (the nation lost 33 percent of its forest cover between 1990 and 2010), with barely 2 percent of the country's total area remaining forested today. One of the prime perpetrators is the Pakistani Taliban, which has long recognized the revenue-generating potential of logging. During its rule over Swat in northern Pakistan, the Taliban's timber sales eliminated up to 15 percent of the picturesque region's forest cover. Separately, back in the 1990s, wealthy landowners in Sindh ordered laborers to clear forestland for crop cultivation; one small village alone lost 10,000 acres of forest. In both Swat and Sindh, the loss of forestland has facilitated riverbank erosion and deprived the country of a natural bulwark against raging floodwaters. More