Himalayan glacier disaster highlights climate change risks

When Ravi Chopra saw the devastating deluge of water and particles crash downstream from a Himalayan glacier about Sunday (Feb 7), his initially thought was that this was exactly the situation that his crew had warned the Indian government of in 2014.

At least 31 persons have died, 165 persons are missing and several are feared to have died. The deluge primary smashed into a tiny dam, gathering more strength since it grew heavier from the particles it collected on the way. Then, it smashed into a much larger, under-engineering dam and gathered a lot more energy.

Chopra and other specialists have been tasked by India's Supreme Court to study the affect of receding glaciers on dams. That they had warned that warming because of climate modification was melting the Himalayan glaciers and facilitated avalanches and landslides, and that constructing dams in the fragile ecosystem was unsafe.

“They were plainly warned, yet they went ahead,” said Chopra, director of the non-profit People’s Science Institute.

Scientists had primary suspected a glacial lake had burst on Sunday. After examining satellite photos, they now believe that a landslide and avalanche had been the more likely factors behind the disaster. 

It isn't clear if the landslide induced an avalanche of ice and particles, or perhaps whether falling ice led to the landslide, said Mohammad Farooq Azam, who analyses glaciers at the Indian Institute of Technology at Indore.

What is known is that mass of rock, boulders, ice and snow came crashing straight down a 2-kilometre close to vertical mountain slope on Sunday. And today scientists want to amount out if the heat produced due to friction would be more than enough to melt the snow and ice to cause the flood of water, he said.

Experts tell you that the disaster underscores the fragility of the Himalayan mountains where in fact the lives of millions are being altered by weather change.

Possibly if the world meets its most ambitious climate transformation targets, rising temperatures will melt away a third of the Himalayan glaciers by the finish of the century, a 2019 report simply by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Production found. Himalayan glaciers happen to be melting twice as fast since 2000 because they were in the 25 years before because of human-caused climate change, researchers reported in Science Developments in 2019.

Whether this specific disaster was due to climate transformation isn't known. But weather change can enhance landslides and avalanches. As glaciers melt because of warming, valleys which were earlier filled with ice start, creating space for landslides to go into. In other places, steep mountainous slopes may be partially "glued" together by ice frozen firmly inside its crevices.

“As warming occurs and the ice melts, the bits can move downhill easier, lubricated by the water,” explained Richard B Alley, a good professor of earth sciences at Pennsylvania Status University.​​​​​​​

With warming, ice can be essentially becoming less frozen: Earlier its temperature would selection between -6 degrees Celsius to -20 degrees Celsius and it it really is right now -2 degrees Celsius,, said Azam. The ice continues to be frozen, but is closer to its melting stage, so it takes less warmth to result in an avalanche than some decades ago, added Azam.

Another threat is going to be that of a glacial lake bursting - what some first of all suspected caused the Sunday's disaster. The hazard posed by these expanding lakes can't be ignored, explained Joerg Michael Schaefer, a climate scientist who specialises in ice and specifically Himalayan glaciers at Columbia University.

The water the lakes release into rivers support the energy equal to “several nuclear bombs” and can provide clean, carbon-free energy through hydropower projects, Schaefer said. But it's unsafe to create power plants without looking uphill and mitigating the chance by siphoning water from the lakes to regulate levels, he said.

“The brute force of the things just kind of just really amazing," particularly if they break, he said. “You cannot tame that tiger. You have to prevent that.”

The Uttarakhand state said it continually faced “acute power shortage” and was forced to invest US$137 million each year to buy electricity, papers submitted to India's Supreme Court show. 

The state gets the second-highest potential for creating hydropower in India, but specialists say that solar energy and wind energy offered more sustainable and a smaller amount risky alternatives in the long-run.

Development was needed for the upliftment of the impoverished place, but authorities said such assignments should take into account the ecological fragility of the mountains and the unpredictable dangers posed by climate transformation.

For instance, through the 2009 construction of the next dam that got hit by flood drinking water on Sunday, employees accidentally punctured an aquifer. Enough water for 2 million to 3 million people to beverage drained out at the level as high as 70 million litres (18.5 million gallons) each day for a month and villages in the region faced water shortages.

Development plans have to “go with the environment” rather than against it, said Anjal Prakash, a professor at the Indian Institution of Business who has contributed to research in to the impacts of climate transformation in the Himalayas for the Intergovernmental Panel on Environment Change.

“Climate modification is here now and now. It isn't something that will probably happen down the road,” he said.