It’s well below freezing as Renoj Thayyen climbs to the weather station high up in India’s Karakoram mountains, his Koflach boots crunching shin-deep into the snow. The 50-year-old hydrologist has been making this trip to study water and weather patterns across the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges every few months for nearly three decades. What he’s recorded alarms his fellow scientists and the governments they advise. Reaching a hut at 15,500 feet (4,700 meters), Thayyen plugs in a rectangular device like an outsized USB and downloads six months of data, from gauges of atmospheric temperature and sun duration to depth of snowfall. Water discharge readings are relayed from the bed of a glacier nearby.
The measurements add to a body of evidence that global warming is disturbing water cycles on the roof of the world, and in unpredictable ways. Snow cover is shrinking, glaciers are melting, the monsoon season changing and permafrost is at risk, all with drastic consequences for a region whose ice fields hold the largest freshwater reserves outside the poles. “Winter temperatures are rising and glaciers are losing mass,” said Thayyen of India’s National Institute of Hydrology as he transferred the data to his laptop. “That’s impacting water resources in this area.” And the people who depend upon them, since in the upper valleys of the Indus River, “more than elsewhere, glacial meltwater is also linked with livelihoods.”
The shifting dynamics miles above sea level are starting to wreak havoc far below in a river basin twice the size of France. Extreme flooding and drought in recent years has sparked a national emergency in Pakistan, which depends on the Indus for 90% of its food production, and across the border in India, where crop failures have led to a surge in farmer suicides.
Water WarsThe Himalayas supply water to some 1.3 billion people in eight countries And while the main nations at risk should be cooperating to mitigate the impact on hundreds of millions of people who depend on water from the mountains for survival, the opposite is happening. The rush to secure water resources adds to tensions in a region where the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, sit upriver from a host of smaller neighbors, and where India and Pakistan are avowed enemies. Water is becoming weaponized as a result.
Prayer flags snap in the icy wind at the Khardung la pass, 2,000 feet above the weather station. A Buddhist shrine overlooks an excavator clearing snow for the few private vehicles and army convoys headed to Siachen, part of India’s permanent military presence in the disputed frontier region. India and Pakistan have fought over this inhospitable terrain intermittently since 1984, with the loss of more than 2,000 lives, as much to the weather as weapons. Siachen, as well as being one of the largest glaciers in the Karakoram, is considered the highest battleground on earth.