Glacial Lakes

Context:

• Rising moraine-dammed lakes in Himachal Pradesh and Tibet pose significant risks to downstream life and infrastructure.
• Climate change has accelerated the shrinking of the cryospheric cover in the Himalayas, leading to a rapid reduction in glaciers and an increase in the number of unstable high-altitude glacial lakes.
• In the Satluj River catchment, the number of glacial lakes nearly doubled, from 562 in 2019 to 1,048 by 2023.
• The Upper Satluj basin has a particularly high concentration of these glacial lakes, indicating that higher-altitude areas are experiencing greater impacts from climate change compared to lower regions.

Cryosphere Overview:

• The cryosphere encompasses all the frozen components of the Earth’s system, including snow cover, glaciers, ice sheets, ice shelves, icebergs, sea ice, lake ice, river ice, permafrost, seasonally frozen ground, and solid precipitation.

Concerns:

• The increased water volume in these lakes and the heightening of glacier calving increase the likelihood of avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).
• The rapid melting of glaciers, coupled with reduced winter snowfall, could lead to significant habitat destruction, affecting both the natural environment and human settlements downstream.