By Archana Chaudhary and Aaron Clark<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Every year, as the weather warms, teams of Indian scientists trek the Himalayan Mountains to study the Chhota Shigri glacier in India\u2019s northern state of Himachal Pradesh. For the past decade and a half, they\u2019ve recorded the extent of snow cover, checked the temperature of the air and soil, observed the surface of ice formations and measured the discharge from seasonal snowmelt that feeds the river valleys below.<\/p>\n This year, record-breaking glacial melt washed the discharge measuring station clean away.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had installed it in June and by August we couldn’t even find the remnants,\u201d said Mohammad Farooq Azam, a glaciologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. \u201cWe had an intense heat wave in early summer when temperatures in March and April broke 100-year records. And we have had resulting glacial melt. Our team was on a glacier last week and we have seen record-breaking melt in the Himalayas.\u201d<\/p>\n Unprecedented heat waves that swept the planet this summer are melting snow and ice not just in Europe\u2019s Alps but in the iconic Himalayan range, where the mountains shelter the largest reserve of frozen freshwater outside the North and South poles. Global warming is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers much faster than scientists previously thought, destabilizing a fragile system that\u2019s helped regulate the earth\u2019s atmosphere and key water cycles for millennia.<\/p>\n The impact is most acute in Pakistan, where floods have submerged farmland and cities, affecting more than 30 million people and killing upward of 1,000 since June.<\/p>\n There, glacial melt has added to severe monsoon rainfall driven by a warming Arabian Sea and the weather-warping effects of La Nina, creating what Pakistani officials have called a \u201cclimate catastrophe.\u201d That deluge is just the beginning, however.<\/p>\n Hard to comprehend the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan, the 5th most populated nation in the world. <\/p>\n Nearly 1400 dead, 1 million houses damaged or destroyed, and 50,000,000 people displaced. <\/p>\n 1\/3 of the country is underwater.pic.twitter.com\/NFd15q3g7I<\/a><\/p>\n — Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) August 30, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Glacier-2\"](\"https:\/\/sindhcourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Glacier-2.jpg\")
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