Climate Change in Himalaya

In past century, the natural hazard in the form of floods has become the most dominant disaster in the Himalayan region in terms of the frequency and scale of the damage that has been done. For examples, in  Bangladesh flood of 1998 , about 1000 people perished, 700,000 hectares of agricultural lands were wiped, more than a million people lost their home. According to  Asia Development Bank and World Bank 2010 : '' the direct damage caused by the floods was estimated to be US$6.5 billion, with an additional US$3.6 billion in indirect losses''.  Image: S. Bajracharya, ICIMOD, Nepal. Source:  State of Himalayan glaciers less alarming than feared  (http://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/archive/2012/teilentwarnung-fuer-himalaya-gletscher.html) Let’s first look at the nature of two relatively prevalent hazards in the Himalayas:  Monsoon Floods and Outburst Floods Monsoon Floods , as the name explains, are floods from the changes in monsoon r...

The topic of this week Global Environmental Change Seminar is GeoEngineering - known as ‘plan B’ - to counteract or mitigate the effects of climate change particularly driven by greenhouse gases. From Crutzen, P.J.paper 2006 to present, there has been a surge of attention to it along with debates.  Such an intentional intervention to ‘engineer’ the planet has two categories broadly referred as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) .  With good intention to address the climate challenges, the geoengineering proposals are largely theoretical and lack of scientific modelling and empirical research. The most difficult obstacle is the  governance,  legal and management  uncertainties .  The future climate projects leave us with a number of questions and an indeterminate picture of everything we would do to respond to what have done to the planet. The U.N. defines “dangerous anthropogenic interference” as  inadvertent climate...

As we mentioned in the previous post, about 1.3 billion people living in the Himalayan river basins rely on monsoon rainfall and  glacier meltwater   for their livelihoods. Monsoon ( in this blog referring to Indian Summer monsoon) as seasonally reversing winds over the Indian Ocean sustains 1/5 populations on earth for their irrigation, drinking, sanitation, infrastructure, industrial uses and economic development. Map source http://www.meteo.co.in/Monsoons/image004.jpg However, does the magnificent Himalayas let the monsoon system go shallow? The Monsoon has  inter-annual and inter-decadal change ,  temporal and spatial variation factored into their respective onset and retreating rates and dates.The Monsoon-rainfall on set during June to September is a complex system. The  Himalayas have significant influence on the Monsoon system by virtue of high altitude, intercept two branches of summer monsoon coming from Bay Bengal and Arabian sea ...

About 200 million years ago, when  Pangaea  began to break apart, India plate which had been separated by the vast ocean from Eurasia plate since 225 million years ago, started to forge northward into Asian continent, followed by the close of Mesozoic . When the two large landmasses collided about 50 million years ago during Cenozoic  driven by the plate-tectonic movement and rock density, the pressure of impingement forced the plates skyward, and marked the beginning of the uplifts of immense Himalaya mountain range and peaks, including Mt. Everest, who had risen to more than 9km high in just 50 million years . The impinging of the two landmasses, India and Eurasia, has yet to end. Many import stories of Himalayan climate history as well as the Earth's current period related to the past, has yet to be told.  Credit: Zhu Jing (writer), on the way from Skadu  to  Baltoro Glacier, K2 Base Camp Trekking 2015         ...

Hello Everyone, Welcome to my blog about Climate Change in the Himalayas. I pinned down – Himalaya - the most spectacular and scared region in the world on the blog topic without a second thought when I got to know it would be my semester-long assignment for Global Environmental Change class as part of Master program of Climate Change in UCL. I picked up Himalayans not only because I have been fascinated by its breathtakingly beautiful landscape and incredible biodiversity, but also seeing that compared with the frequently reported and well-known glaciers retreating in the Arctic and Antarctic, the complete science report of climate change at the 3rd pole is meagre and inadequate. Although evidence suggested that Himalayan region is warming there are still scientific uncertainties and questions to be addressed and resolved to understand the complex cause, trend, implication and significance in depth. Therefore, I am intrigued to continue with my study in this blog to seek for scien...