By Dinesh C Sharma
New Delhi: Glaciers in the Himalayas, which store large amounts of water in the form of glacial ice, have an intricate relationship with climate change. A new study in an important basin in the Indian Himalayas shows that low-altitude glaciers are more sensitive to climate change and have lost a significant amount of water in the past three decades.
An understanding of fresh water stored in the Himalayas is crucial for water resource management in the region, but it has been difficult to estimate the amounts of water stored in these glaciers. Researchers have now used a new technique to estimate mass of glaciers and a new model to estimate the volume loss over a long period. It combines satellite data of snowlines, a temperature-index melt model and the accumulation-area ratio method to estimate annual mass balance of glaciers in the basin as a whole.
