Requiem for a glacier: Tribute held in Nepal for one of the Hindu Kush Himalaya’s most-studied rivers of ice

• Langtang’s Yala Glacier set to join growing numbers of glaciers around the world declared dead due to temperature rise
• Over 50 people gather above 5,000M today to pay tribute to disappearing ice
• Granite stones carved with words by authors Manjushree Thapa and Andri Snaer Magnason laid at site where glacier currently stands.

Locals of Langtang, Nepal, and glaciologists from four glaciated countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) gathered to mark the accelerating disappearance of Nepal’s Yala Glacier in Langtang, Nepal, today.

Yala, which has shrunk by 66% and retreated 784M since it was first measured in the 1970s is projected to be among the first Nepali glaciers to join the growing numbers of glaciers declared ‘dead’ worldwide.

Over 50 people, including Buddhist monks and members of local community, and glacier experts from Bhutan, China, India, and Nepal completed the arduous high-altitude trek to attend the “poignant” tribute event today (Monday 12th), which featured a Buddhist ceremony, speeches, and the unveiling of two granite memorial plaques which will sit at the foot of where the glacier today stands.

Yala is notable not just for its rapid retreat, but also, thanks to its proximity to Kathmandu relative to other glacierised areas, for the central role it has played in advancing cryosphere research in a region that is known for lacking research capacity.

Circa 100 people, including Afghan, Chinese, Indian, Nepali and Pakistani nationals, have trained as glaciologists on Yala since ICIMOD started running training field visits to the site in 2011, and the glacier has served as a research site for 50 years.

Despite their importance in the provision of water for river flow on which billions of people rely and the fact that mountains in the region hold the largest mass of ice and snowpack outside the two geographic polar regions, glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas are hugely understudied.

Yala is one of just seven glaciers in the entire 3,500km-long arc of the Hindu Kush Himalayas to have been monitored annually for a decade or more and it is one of 38 glaciers with in-situ measurements, providing crucial data on the speed and extent of losses.

Earth’s mountains have lost close to nine trillion tonnes of ice since records began in 1975 – the equivalent of a 2.72-metre thick block of ice the size India. On current melt rates, many glaciers worldwide will not survive the 21st century.

The stones left at the base of the glacier carry messages by two world-famous authors, Manjushree Thapa and Andri Snaer Magnason, in English, Nepali and locally spoken Tibetan. Both authors have also backed ICIMOD’s #SaveOurSnow campaign and asked for their author fees to be donated to local climate action.

Thapa’s inscription states: “Yala, where the gods dream high in the mountains, where the cold is divine. Dream of life in rock, sediment, and snow, in the pulverizing of ice and earth, in meltwater pools the colour of sky. Dream. Dream of a glacier and the civilizations downstream. Entire ecosystems: our own sustenance. The cosmos. And all that we know and all that we love.”

Magnason’s inscription reads: “A message to the future: Yala glacier is one of 54,000 glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, most of which are expected to vanish this century due to global warming. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. May 2025 426ppm CO2 [parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere]”

Yala is the first glacier in Asia and the third glacier worldwide to carry a version of these words by Magnason. Plaques bearing his message also sit at the site of the world’s first glacier funeral, which took place in Magnason’s native Iceland in 2019, for OK Glacier, and at the site of the funeral for Ayoloco glacier in Mexico in 2021.

Funerals have also been held for the Swiss Pizol glacier in 2019, Clark glacier in Oregon in 2020, and Basodino glacier in Switzerland in 2021.

The tribute to Yala was organised by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), working with local authority partners, including Gosaikunda Rural Municipality Ward No 4.

“Yala’s accelerating disappearance is totemic of the disastrous deglaciation and loss of snowpack we’re now seeing unfold across Earth’s mountains at a pace that far outstrips scientists’ worst-case scenarios,” said Pema Gyamtsho, Director General ICIMOD.

“It’s vital that business and political leaders worldwide understand that this region’s future prosperity and security – our food production, our water supplies, our industries, our energy, and our national security – are intimately bound up in the preservation of glaciers. Our common future is absolutely contingent on greater regional cooperation to manage these shared resources, and rapid emissions reductions and the acceleration of the transition to clean energy to limit glacier losses.”

Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary and special envoy for and chief negotiator on climate change for India, who is attending the Government of Nepal’s Sagarmatha Sambaad event this week said: “I’ve trekked the mountains of the Himalayas for decades. The pace and scale of the deglaciation and loss of snowpack happening now, and which I’ve seen with my own eyes, is truly breathtaking.

“While this thawing is currently upping the water available for Asia’s major economies and huge urban centres, we know this water is set to decline from mid-century – just 25 years from now. This has major implications for this region.

“Tragically, the issues that divide us today, and which are rightly commanding so much global attention right now, are set to be dwarfed by the kinds of disasters we’ll be facing if we don’t recognise our interconnectedness with the ecological systems that support us, and act together, for our common future, now.”

ICIMOD’s glacier monitoring is supported by the Government of Norway and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

Additional quotes

Sharad Prasad Joshi, a Cryosphere Analyst at ICIMOD and Nepal’s national correspondent for the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS). The tribute event will be the fourteenth year and the twenty-sixth time that Joshi has visited Yala.

Speaking on the eve of the event he said: “On the one hand, I’m incredibly proud that this glacier has served as an open book, to train the next generation of researchers in this field in a region where our capacity to monitor and therefore predict and act on what is happening to these vital water reserves continues to lag so far behind that of other countries’ and cryosphere zones.

“But to see how quickly the glacier has retreated is incredibly sad, on a personal level, and as a researcher.

“As a researcher, I studied where the glacier used to be, in 1981. It feels like a dream, to see how drastically it’s changed in those 50 years and how those changes have accelerated since my first trip here in 2011, to know and see with my own eyes the pace of the retreat and how low the glacier has sunk since I’ve been coming here. Locally, the pasture land is now so dry the yak herders cannot graze their livestock here.

“Instead of a white glacier, it’s rocky, with debris. Aesthetically, and on a personal level, this is incredibly sad. As a researcher, I know what huge implications – the exposed bedrock means there’s no longer albedo, so this will trigger further temperature rise. And of course the loss of this and other glaciers has implications for water, livelihoods, and more downstream.

“Yala is representative. This issue is not just about glaciers in Nepal. This is happening across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, and the world. We are losing our glaciers. Yala represents the true casualties – all glaciers in Nepal are now receding – of global warming.

“My hope is that by doing this event, now, before the glacier is gone, we will give glacier losses more prominence. There’s still not enough awareness. Personally and professionally, it feels incredibly important to make the sorts of dramatic losses we’re seeing in Yala visible – we felt like we needed to show people the reality. It feels like noone’s paying sufficient attention to this issue and it is so consequential. In the future, maybe people will look back at where the glacier used to be now, and in 2011, and when measurements began, and realise it used to be this big.

“I’m hoping we’re able to make more people aware, and to share what I learned and experienced from Yala, from monitoring this glacier, especially for those who cannot come here and see this for themselves, and to show them that this glacier and the world’s glaciers are our lifelines.”

Images and B-roll available here: https://vault.icimod.org/?c=179&k=b2e2378856
(Images of ceremony to follow in the same link by EOD)