Scientists And Monks Perform Last Rites For A Himalayan Glacier

At a little over 5,000 metres above sea level, Buddhist monks, members of Nepal’s Langtang Valley community, and scientists gathered for an unusual ceremony. High in the Himalayas, just north of the capital Kathmandu, science and faith came together in honour of the Yala glacier, which is set to become among the first Nepali glaciers to be declared dead.

It will join glaciers such as Okjökull in Iceland and Anderson in north-western continental US, both declared dead around a decade ago, having receded to less than 10% of their original size.

Glaciers have been mourned before. But the tribute to Yala was different in how it involved spiritual and traditional rituals of commemoration. Buddhist mantras were chanted during the puja (reverence) organised by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), attended by glaciologists from India, Pakistan, Nepal, and China.

Since the 1970s, when it was first measured, Yala has shrunk by 66% and retreated by 784 metres, ICIMOD notes. For years, scientists have visited the glacier, aided by its proximity to Kathmandu, for scientific assessments that have helped advance cryospheric research in the region. Around 100 early career researchers from India, Nepal, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan have trained as glaciologists on Yala since 2011 with the organisation.

Due to the long-term scientific study of Yala and consequent bank of data, Yala functions as a reference glacier for the region. Its sustained in-situ measurements have been critical for tracking Himalayan glacier health.

Yala was the first glacier that Sunwi Maskey, a cryosphere research associate at ICIMOD, stepped on to conduct research in 2017. When she next visited six years later she witnessed drastic changes. “Previously, we could walk up to the [glacier’s] terminus, [set up] camp and then start walking on the glacier,” she recalls. “But in 2023, the same point where we had established as the camp point had receded far beyond, and we had to then climb to get on the glacier, which was not… easy.”

She adds: “Witnessing these changes… made me realise that maybe within a decade, Yala might not be there for us to see.”

Yala’s cultural significance

The glacier is significant not only to the scientists, but the local community of Langtang Valley. “Our yaks drink the water that comes from Yala; they eat the grass that grows around Yala,” says Karma Tamang Lama, the 60-year-old owner of a guesthouse in Kyanjin Gompa, a village in the Langtang Valley. He recites a Tibetan saying famous in his region: “Gangri korni mayong, Gangchu thungni yongsong”, or: “I haven’t been able to travel to the Himalayas, but I have had the chance to drink its water.”

Participating in the puja, he says, was a strange yet happy experience for him. Although Himalayan communities have often prayed to mountains, many had never gone up to such a height for prayers. “I had never been able to perform a puja so close to a glacier or a glacier-fed river like this. With this puja, we were able to worship the gods and goddesses around the Himalayas and the protective deities who look after us,” says Lama. “Because of that, I felt hopeful that no bad events would happen to us in the future.”

The tribute also helped bridge a communication gap between scientists and local communities by encouraging conversations involving both scientific findings and the lived realities of the communities. For scientists at ICIMOD, visits to Yala had been limited to scientific study. This time, they wanted to involve local communities and pay their respects to the disappearing glacier, as well as to honour the science.

During the conversation, the communities and scientists both expressed and heard about their mutual interest in protecting the mountains through their distinct approaches. For communities in the Langtang Valley, mountains are gods, and their traditional customs treat glaciers as sacred. They seek to minimise their own impacts on mountains through sustainable living practices such as seasonal grazing and protection of the ecosystems around them as an expression of respect. Their faith and spirituality present a unique way of conservation.

Maskey recounts that although the communities had seen scientists visiting the area, local people were not entirely sure what they were doing near the glaciers. This meeting explained things. “There was a communication gap. They thought that we were around the glaciers drilling holes when we were conducting studies,” she says. Scientists need to continue communicating the reasons for their interactions with the glaciers to local communities, Maskey adds, noting that this will help explain the importance of such work and minimise misunderstandings.

Another of the challenges, she says, has been the language barrier – local communities primarily speak Nepali and Tibetan, which many of the international team at ICIMOD do not. As a result, discussing the glaciers with the community has proven difficult, but during the ceremony, they had translators on hand.

Organising the tribute was an essential part of creating awareness around retreating glaciers amid news fatigue around them, Maskey notes. Additionally, she says that scientists mostly talk about glaciers in terms of numbers and hard evidence, which often fails to resonate with communities unfamiliar with the language of glaciology. A tribute like this offers a powerful visual and emotional representation of what it means to lose a glacier. Scientists brought local communities to the base of the glacier, allowing them to see it up close for the first time, creating a shared moment of reckoning and remembrance.

However, Maskey cautions that such tributes can only be paid in moderation. “If we start giving tribute to all the glaciers like this, then that might also create some kind of panic, which we don’t want,” she notes, adding that the “dying of glaciers could just be normalised if you pay tribute to every retreating glacier”.

The understudied glaciers of the Hindu Kush Himalayas

The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, often called the Third Pole, holds the largest volume of ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Its glaciers feed ten major river systems in Asia, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Indus, and support the water needs of nearly two billion people across the continent. Yet, this vital region is warming faster than the global average. A 2023 ICIMOD study showed that glaciers in this region lost ice 65% faster in 2010-2019 compared to the decade prior.

“When we talk about global warming, Himalayan glaciers are very underrepresented. We talk about ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, but not the Himalayan belt which has a lot of glaciers [that] are very underrepresented,” says Maskey. “That might also be because very few people have [specific] experiences in this area and very few people speak about this.”

Maskey lists a few reasons why there is a dearth of research on Himalayan glaciers. The region’s remote and rugged terrain, along with unpredictable and severe weather conditions, makes it very difficult for studies. The sparse infrastructure makes transporting equipment, setting up camps, and ensuring the safety of researchers challenging and expensive. This becomes particularly difficult in the absence of local expertise and funding at the regional level. There are also significant technological gaps, including limited access to advanced monitoring tools – especially as their diverse forms, from “clean” valley glaciers to those that are debris-covered, make data collection and interpretation complex.

But glaciers retreating are not isolated events. As ice vanishes from these regions, communities face growing water-related risks such as reduced water availability, more frequent glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), and impacts on agriculture and hydropower in the broader region. Maskey underlines the urgent need to make adaptive and sustainable decisions to help local communities that are experiencing first-hand impacts. “Due to climate change, glaciers are melting. Many landslides and glacier-related disasters are now taking place. This worries me a lot,” says Lama. “We need to focus on prevention and slowing down the melting process.”

Along with the severe ecological implications, threats loom large on Kyanjin Gompo’s cultural traditions as well. Decades ago, when the women of the community visited Mount Tserko Ri in the Langtang Valley as part of religious festivals, they could see snow, ice and the mountain ranges. Today, as they embark on the same pilgrimage, “we no longer see the ice, and many of the mountain ranges have also faded away”, says Lama. “Seeing the hills and ridges naked like that brings much sadness.”

As he tells Dialogue Earth about Yala, Lama shares a Tibetan chant: “Chuni, Chuni rang zhim bey, Yala gangu yinna zhimbey,” or: “Water is indeed sweet, but the glacial water coming from Yala is even sweeter”.

Maskey says that the current situation of retreating glaciers and the world moving towards more warming is grim, but that as a young scientist, she is optimistic, and hopes the organisation’s work on Himalayan glaciers reaches a global audience. “I know it’s sad, but that doesn’t mean I should stop working on it. If I stop working on glaciers, then it will be the end [of any hope], right?”

Experts say that a glacier is considered dead when it is too thin and becomes unable to move under the force of its own weight. Maskey emphasises that Yala is not yet dead, and the monitoring continues. But the ceremony is a tragic reminder of the fragility of the many glaciers in the HKH and beyond in the face of climate change. By the 2040s, Yala could cease to exist, ICIMOD notes. But at the foot of where the glacier stands today, these words by author Manjushree Thapa, written in English, Nepali and Tibetan, etched on granite, will remain – a reminder to visitors of just how vast and all-encompassing Yala is:

Yala, where the gods dream high in the mountains, where the cold is divine. Dream of life in rock, sediment, and snow, in the pulverising of ice and earth, in meltwater pools the colour of sky. Dream. Dream of a glacier and the civilisations downstream. Entire ecosystems: our own sustenance. The cosmos. And all that we know and all that we love.

(Published under Creative Commons from Dialogue Earth. Read the original article here)