Above: Prayer flags, sacred stones and shrines known as chortens can be seen along the trek through the Khumbu region to Nepal’s glacier lakes. Photo courtesy of Daniel Byers.
NAMCHE BAZAAR, Nepal -- By this time next month, Kancha Sherpa will, once again, become a busy man.
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| Kancha Sherpa. Photo by Lisa Friedman. |
At 79, he is the last man living among the 103 guides who accompanied the famous mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary on the first successful 1953 expedition to Everest. Come peak tourist season in this ancient village of Internet cafes, Nepali crafts and gear shops that serves as the gateway to Mount Everest Base Camp, Kancha Sherpa will be besieged by journalists and climbers alike eager to hear his memories of the ascent.
For a token gift -- an energy drink that his great-niece, Kami Sherpa, says he enjoys -- Kancha Sherpa will oblige. But nowadays, part of his story is not about his adventures, but of the majestic mountain itself and how much its character has changed. In his climbing days, Kancha Sherpa recalls, the trek from Gorka Shep to Everest Base Camp was an uphill climb on the pristine ice. Now the ice has gone. In its place is a rough pathway of rocks and packed dirt.
Experts worry that climate change is at work here and could, eventually, reduce freshwater supplies for billions of people who use the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Indus and other rivers fed by the glaciers. Idly spinning a Buddhist prayer wheel in his family room as his wife serves sweet milk tea to guests, the veteran guide offers his own reasons for what he sees happening to his mountain.
The Himalayan glaciers represent the planet’s largest body of ice outside of the polar caps, and its seasonal melt feeds Asia’s largest rivers. But climate change is altering the crucial water supply from these mountains, and few countries appear prepared to adapt. E&E reporter Lisa Friedman spent 10 days in Nepal’s Khumbu region to tell the story of the uncertain future that the retreating glaciers are creating for the people of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas.
Namdu Sherpa picked potatoes as a girl in Namche Bazaar, the only economy in her village before Mount Everest-bound adventurers made a habit of trekking through with their Gore-Tex jackets and titanium walking poles. Almost overnight, the 75-year-old great-grandmother said, her small trading post in Nepal's Khumbu Valley transformed into a bustling tourist hub of lodges and cyber cafes.
Nodding toward her gleaming Samsung refrigerator and microwave, Namdu Sherpa said life has changed dramatically from the days of tending crops and cooking over firewood. Through the years, though, one thing remained constant: the majestic snow-capped Himalayan mountains. Until recently, that is.
"The mountains used to be white. Now, the mountains don't seem so white. It's all rocks," she said, looking out her kitchen window at the cloud-covered peaks. "We don't know exactly what's happening."
Neither, it seems, do scientists. There is widespread acknowledgement that the snow cover in the Himalayan mountain range is declining, and that many glaciers are retreating at a rapid rate. But everything else -- from where melt is occurring to how fast, how much melt contributes to downstream water use, and even to what extent greenhouse gas emissions play a role compared to soot -- is being answered at a glacial pace.
The difficulty in obtaining solid data on the mountain range is rooted in both the area's remoteness and regional political rancor. Compounding the uncertainty is doubt about the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had stated in 2007, wrongly, that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. Scientists say the doomsday scenario error did lasting damage to popular understanding of the Himalayas. It also underscored how tenuous their grasp on the region really is.
"The knowledge gap is large," said Richard Armstrong, a glaciologist and senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Armstrong and dozens of other scientists met in Washington, D.C., this month with the National Academy of Sciences to begin to tease out the answers to some of the most vexing questions.
Scientists note that the Himalayan glaciers are sensitive to summer warming because both accumulation and ablation, or melting, primarily occur during the summer monsoon season. That means small increases in summer temperatures accelerate the melt while at the same time causing precipitation to fall as rain, which flows away, rather than snow.
In the weeks before a major meeting of Indian and Pakistani ministers, disaster experts and youth leaders in Lahore to discuss Himalayan glacier melt, Malini Mehra avoided reporters.
The normally outspoken director of an Indian environmental organization that was helping to organize the conference, Mehra said she had seen too many exchanges between India and Pakistan on critical water issues disintegrate in a pool of visa denials and political acrimony. Too much attention, she worried, could doom her conference to the same fate.
"Before I started this, I was warned that it was impossible," Mehra said. "At the beginning, we were beset with fear and suspicion that it was going to be derailed by people who would prefer that Indians and Pakistanis didn't have a full, frank and healthy dialogue on water impacts and how to manage disasters effectively. I heard story after story of just absolute horror."
The conference went off without a hitch, but even those who hosted the exchange say it was just a drop in the bucket of badly needed scientific and policy cooperation on the Himalayas between the two nuclear-armed archrivals.
India and Pakistan share a fractious border, 60 years of enmity and the waters of the Indus River. Originating more than 17,000 feet above sea level in the Tibetan Plateau, the Indus crosses the hotly contested Himalayan Kashmir, fertilizing rich farmland in both India and Pakistan, before flowing into the Arabian Sea south of Karachi.
The scruffy group of scientists had taken their first showers in more than a week after trekking the snow-capped Himalayan mountains, and were eager to tell officials in Kathmandu about the growing dangers they witnessed at Nepal's fastest-growing glacier lake.
But Andreas Schild, director-general of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), was not impressed. Lake Imja, he said, is low on Nepal's list of vulnerable lakes -- and he suggested it might be in greater danger of overflowing with scientists than with water.
"Be careful," Schild warned the stunned group of glaciologists, geologists and engineers working with the Mountain Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation and research group that led the expedition with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. "If you are cocksure about your findings, remember that others are equally sure of their findings. Some think that there are areas that are more risky, but not as easy to access as Imja Lake."
The lake, a massive pool of concrete-gray waters in Nepal's Dudh Kosi Basin, barely existed a half-century ago. But as the Imja Glacier southeast of Mount Everest receded, the accumulating waters steadily swelled a handful of melt ponds that grew together to form Imja Tsho, or Imja Lake.
Perched at an altitude higher than 16,000 feet, and the size of about 200 football fields, Imja drains through a valley that traces the country's only trail to Mount Everest Base Camp. The glacier continues to lose about 35 meters of ice each year, and the lake has grown an average of half an acre each year.
The Sherpa stew sloshed out of my bowl as the wooden table in our Himalayan lodge swayed back and forth. Someone yelled "Earthquake!" and I bolted for the door with other panicked trekkers, tumbling into the chilly mountain night.
Farther up the mountain, the international group of glaciologists and engineers I was climbing to meet were huddled outside their own lodge in the village of Lobuche below Everest Base Camp. At higher than 16,000 feet in the dark, they could hear -- but, terrifyingly, not see -- an avalanche of snow falling from one of the highest peaks in the world.
They were just a day's hike from Imja Lake, a sweeping body of gray water along the Everest trail that had swelled from a few ponds in just half a century as the seemingly indestructible glacier above it steadily melted away. Many of them experts in a phenomenon known as glacier lake outburst flooding, or GLOFs, the scientists knew a magnitude-6.8 temblor like the one that struck that night had the power to make a fragile lake empty itself, destroying everything in its path.
KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Rain pummels the chaotic streets here. Cars, rickshaws and motorbikes pack the roads, swerving around the occasional cow. The unrelenting blare of honking that is the music of this city seems to amplify with every falling drop.
Dipak Khan looks outside his jewelry shop in Thamel, where vendors hawk yak wool blankets and wallets decorated with Buddha eyes. It is the first day of Dashain, the Hindu festival that marks the end of the long monsoon season. A group of tourists ducks under a doorway for cover from the downpour. Khan is worried.
"This is the global warming," Khan says with conviction. "The rains should not come this late. It hurts everything. The tourists do not want to walk around in this. It is very bad for business."
Climate change cannot be linked to any one weather event. But scientists, environmental activists and Nepalis themselves say the monsoon season so critical to agriculture is undoubtedly changing. Whether driven by cyclic changes, rising global temperatures or both, they say, the new patterns shaking up the June-through-September South Asian monsoon season are hurting crop yields and exacerbating already-existing problems of poverty and failed development.
The breathtaking Himalayas and the fate of their glaciers may capture the majority of climate change attention in Nepal. But activists point out that from the fertile plains to the overcrowded capital of Kathmandu, the landlocked country sandwiched between China and India faces widespread threats to crop production, livestock and water availability.
KATHMANDU, Nepal -- Cigarette packs, candy wrappers, plastic water bottles and the occasional shoe litter the narrow streets here and clog the gutters. Sanu Kaji Shrestha looks around and sees gems.
From a shed in a quiet courtyard a few hundred yards from the chaos of the city streets, Shrestha tries to turn Kathmandu garbage into its energy future. Everything from seaweed to sawdust makes its way into his Foundation for Sustainable Technologies, coming out the other end a "briquette" of low-smoke, long-burning fuel that he believes could change the lives of the poor in Nepal and elsewhere.
"Every bit of grass has energy," he proclaims with a broad smile, showing off the fuel bricks he has made from dried leaves, kitchen scraps and even date pits from the Middle East. "I just make energy from the waste material that we produce."
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