Written by: Dawar N. H. Butt
Posted on: August 13, 2019 | 
Camping near Hopper Glacier
As we trek the Hopper glacier, the guide-cum-porter Haider starts narrating the valley’s tale. “The glacier we are walking on, Hopper, it’s alive.” Animistic cultures of the “third pole” had believed during ancient times that the glaciers and mountains of the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKH) region were deities. When weather was pleasant, they provided water. When angry, they loudly roared and sent avalanches.
The trek party thought this is what Haider is speaking of. But he continued, “every night the glacier moves away. Some mornings we cannot recognize it and have to mark new paths to cross it.” This was intriguing, and beyond the understanding of city-dwellers. Many understood it to be tourist-baiting folklore, and kept listening till we had crossed over. We set up camp for the night and went to sleep. It wasn’t until morning that I saw what Haider was talking about. Boulders, seemingly out of nowhere, were now present at the end of the path we had used.
Back in the village, we were able to connect the dots. The Hopper glacier, which is not supposed to move by a few inches during summer nights, had been moving by more than a foot, regularly. Unfortunately, there is little historical data available on glacial movement to confirm this as an anomaly. What is available are the accounts of locals much older than Haider. The vast contrast between their memories and what has been happening indeed should raise alarm bells. Essentially, what we had witnessed was climate change in real-time.
Pakistan’s northern areas are home to the world’s largest glaciers outside the polar regions. While city-dwellers might not be aware of the legends behind these glaciers, we are absolutely and severely dependent and at the mercy of these moving giants. The water from Hopper falls into the Hunza river, which along with other sources, feed the Indus river. The Indus river basin alone feeds more than 200 million people. Haider’s tale foretold of the impending climate events we are likely to witness in the future.
Back in the northern areas, the predicament is much more closely felt, but with little use. The HKH Assessment, published this year, establishes that even if the world somehow controls Global Warming within a 1.5 C increase, it is likely that the effective average increase in this region would be nearly 2.0 C due to its high elevation.
This was also the prediction made in the IPCC special report, published in 2017. In layperson terms, the current global warming levels have already put in motion a string of climate disasters all over Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, which are gradually only going to spread further south.
On July 7th, alerts went up in Rohghali, Golain Valley in Chitral. A flash flood had occurred, and its origin was an englacial lake. The Pakistan Meteorological Department reported that the temperatures were 2.0 C above the normal. The flood managed to temporarily disconnect the valley from the rest of the country, and left it without power supply. This is unfortunately the new normal for the last few decades. Some estimates suggest that the snowline has receded by 1.1 km in the last 30 years.
(Chart: No. of glacial lakes in Chitral district and Gilgit-Baltistan region)
While in the bigger picture, these incidents appear minor, even sporadic. But they can serve the key function of knowledge building and awareness. Glaciers and communities in the northern areas are the first to bear the brunt of climate change, but the magnitude of this is vastly underreported. According to recent reports, as many as 3,044 glacial lakes are present in Gilgit-Baltistan, while separately 116 exist in Chitral district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
One example that often comes to mind is the Attabad disaster. But it has been over the nine years since the glacial lake burst, destroying multiple villages and parts of the Karakoram Highway. The vast numbers of tourists who throng the lake for picturesque imagery have sanitized the climate disaster. This over-population of tourse invite more intrusions and emissions, and feed into the vicious cycle of glacier loss.
Perhaps, the lesson here is not just that the glaciers have come to life, it is that they are dying. It is this death of these ancient giants that can trigger the death of cultures, nature and peoples. Haider’s excitement in narrating the tale was not misplaced. In fact, it was this interaction that allowed many to both humanize and understand the peculiarities of the climate crisis for indigenous northerners. It is also stories like these which remind us that the current crisis is a consequence of smaller, ignored crises, which can be mitigated individually. Whence this is understood by the likes of you or me, individual actions will be what helps us preserve, and keep the glaciers alive.
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