![]() ![]() “But we’ve never experienced so many dangerous lakes in such a short amount of time. “There have always been GLOF events,” Byers says. By a benevolent twist of fate, the flood happened during a festival celebrating the coming harvest, so there were few local residents near the river that day, which undoubtedly saved lives. According to some reports, several people were killed. The flood destroyed 14 bridges, about 30 houses, and a new hydroelectric plant. The Sherpa who saw it described a black mass of water slowly moving down the valley, accompanied by a loud noise like many helicopters and the smell of freshly tilled earth. “It’s all happening much faster than we expected it to even five or 10 years ago,” says Alton Byers, a National Geographic explorer and mountain geographer at the University of Colorado Boulder. Because of the remote locations, scientists must rely on satellites to count them, and new lakes appear to be growing so quickly that it’s difficult for scientific teams to agree on the precise number. In fact, another study found that from 1990 to 2010, more than 900 new glacier-fed lakes were formed across Asia’s high mountain ranges. The answer is that the Himalaya, long defined by its glaciers, is rapidly becoming a mountain range defined by lakes. But the survey also looked at a more immediate question: As the glaciers rapidly melt, where will all the water-more than a quadrillion gallons of it, roughly the amount contained in Lake Huron-go? This is a dire prediction for some 1.9 billion South Asians, who rely on the glaciers for water-used not only for drinking and sanitation but also for agriculture, hydroelectric power, and tourism. ![]()
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