Youngsters sought to brave Himalayan glaciers for $400 a month

Live Mint , Thursday, December 04, 2014
Correspondent : Adi Narayan

Mumbai: They are the third-largest storehouse of ice on the planet and contain the world’s tallest mountains with rivers sustaining millions of people. Yet the Himalayan watersheds are one of the least studied glaciers on earth, which means no one knows how a warming planet would change river flows, trigger floods or affect farming. Alagappan Ramanathan is on a mission to change that, by grooming a corps of young scientists who’d fan out across the Himalayas to gather data on glaciers for decades to come. The 52-year-old professor of environmental science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has his job cut out. He has to convince graduate students in their early 20s to swap the promise of well-paying programming jobs for a future dodging crevasses and braving altitude sickness on snowfields where temperatures can drop to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). There are so few glaciologists in India that only about a dozen of the nearly 9,700 glaciers in the Indian Himalayas are being monitored, and the situation is even worse in Pakistan. “There are so many many more glaciers in the Himalayas compared to the Alps,” said Markus Stoffel, a glacier expert at the University of Geneva, who’s worked in south Asia since 2003. “And there is a huge lack of data — in fact we don’t even have detailed information on how much ice there is in the mountains.” Climate talks As crucial climate talks get underway in Lima, Peru this week, scientists half a world away are racing to understand what happens when glaciers straddling seven nations and spawning rivers that sustain 800 million people, melt too fast. Himalayan glaciers have probably lost 13% of their area since the 1970s. Faster melting can raise the risk of devastating floods and make river flows unpredictable, increasing tensions over water in the world’s most militarized mountain zone. In September, Ramanathan sent a dozen students, half of whom had never seen snow in their lives, on an all-expenses-paid trip to Chhota Shigri, a glacier in northern India, 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of the Tibetan border. A Bloomberg reporter joined the expedition, which spent two weeks trekking up paths carpeted with boulders and across snowy ridges, learning how to measure the rate of ice melt, and getting accustomed to the piercing altitude headaches that are inevitable at 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) above sea level. Frigid weather “There is less oxygen, you face lung problems and psychological problems,” Ramanathan said at his office as team members prepared for the expedition. “For 15 days you see no other people and only rocks and ice.” Himalayan snowfields are at higher altitudes more challenging to ascend compared with other alpine glaciers in the world. Finding students interested in glaciology in a tropical nation like India is also a challenge because most universities and colleges are in the country’s interiors where people aren’t exposed to extreme conditions. One student in the group even had to be evacuated after her vision failed due to altitude-related problems. For 26-year old Lydia Sam, another participant who had never set foot on snow before, the frigid weather presented the greatest challenge. Her trip was marred by a litany of ailments: repeated fevers, nausea, stomachache, headaches and a twisted ankle. “After all those complications, I didn’t really expect to reach the top,” Sam, a senior research fellow at the military- run Defence Terrain Research Laboratory in Delhi, said as she sipped tea at the base camp. “But when we hiked up to the highest camp, the glacier was unspeakably beautiful. I was speechless.” Programme funding The high camp was located on a rocky patch at about 15,000 feet — higher than Mount Rainier’s peak — facing the glacier’s two main snow-filled tributaries. Temperatures slid to -10 degrees Celsius in the night and the whitish glow of the milky- way galaxy was visible as an arc in the star-studded sky. To make the trek less challenging for the students, Ramanathan hired 14 Nepalese porters who cleared boulders, set up camps on rocky outcrops and carried the luggage, including a household cooking gas cylinder weighing 35 pounds. A mobile kitchen served up a steady supply of Indian staples such as rice, flatbread, lentils and vegetable curry, punctuated with sweetened milk tea every few hours. “Back when I went on my first trip, we only had protein bars and canned food — I couldn’t eat it,” Ramanathan said, referring to his first trip to the same glacier in 2006. “Now things are much better, the food is the same as you’d eat at home and you don’t have to carry all the equipment yourself.” Glacier volumes The training camp was part of a programme funded by the Indian and Swiss governments, and served as a crash course in all the skills a glaciologist needs to know. Students sketched rocks, measured stream flows, and mapped the watershed during the day, as professors conducted impromptu quizzes on geology and climate science. The tents in the camp glowed late into the night as the cadets huddled together to finish assignments under the shine of their flashlights. To get to the base of Chhota Shigri, the group had to hop over a forest of washing machine-sized boulders that appeared to blanket the entire surface. The boulders are a characteristic of the Himalayas and complicate efforts to map these glaciers from space. “It’s very difficult for satellites to see what’s going on when everything is covered with rocks,” said American geologist John Shroder, who’s made about 20 expeditions to the Himalayas since 1968. “You have to get down there and do the sampling by sticking rods into the ice.” Ice caps melting He is referring to a method for measuring the change in a glacier’s volume that was pioneered by the Swiss in 1914 and is used everywhere from Greenland to Antarctica. An overwhelming body of scientific evidence now exists that human activity is warming the planet, accelerating the melting of ice caps and changing weather patterns around the world. Antarctic glaciers alone are losing in water weight the equivalent of Mt. Everest every two years, according to a 21- year analysis by NASA and the University of California at Irvine, announced yesterday. Glacier and ice sheet behavior worldwide is by far “the greatest uncertainty” predicting future sea level, the researchers said in a statement from the American Geophysical Union. Problem’s scale Even the best estimates for the amount of water locked up in Himalayan glaciers are “highly uncertain,” so determining how much of that stored capacity is disappearing each year is difficult, scientists wrote in an influential 2012 review in the journal Science. More than 800 million people live in the basins of the three main Himalayan-origin rivers, making the study of the glaciers a major global priority, said Graham Cogley, an emeritus professor of geography at Trent University in the Canadian province of Ontario. “Policymakers and politicians haven’t grasped the scale of the problem yet,” Cogley said via phone from his home in Peterborough. “Understanding these glaciers is vitally important.” Monitoring glaciers is inherently a long-term activity, as scientists need at least 20 or 30 years of data to determine the extent of glacier retreat. From the limited data available, it appears that the Himalayan snowfields have lost 13% of their area in the last four to five decades, according to a January article in the journal Current Science. ‘Heavy price’ The retreat is worrisome given that the watershed feeds into south Asia’s biggest rivers — the Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra. India alone has built at least 3,553 large dams since 1971, according to data from the Central Water Commission. Many more are planned. Some of these projects could fail if the river flows change, threatening livelihoods of millions of people in the surrounding countryside. “We are going to pay a heavy price for not doing robust research on glaciers,” Himanshu Thakkar, a coordinator at the nonprofit South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, said in an e-mail. Some of these impacts are already visible. Lakes that hold glacial water have overflowed in recent years, catastrophically flooding villages and towns. India’s glacier research programme got an unintended boost seven years ago following a glaring error made by the UN climate body. The IPCC said in its 2007 report that there was a “very high” likelihood of Himalayan glaciers vanishing by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at current rates. The statement was widely reported by global news organizations even as a chorus of leading scientists challenged the assertion. Research focus The media attention had a silver lining: it prompted an increase in the government’s funding for glacier research, said Jose Pottakkal, a senior scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. India’s Department of Science & Technology last year spent about Rs15 crore ($2.4 million) on research to monitor nine glaciers, according to a senior government official. As vast swathes of the Himalayas straddle India’s border with its neighbours, the government has traditionally directed its research focus on mapping the terrain and assessing avalanche risk for the military. Even today, India and Pakistan maintain entire brigades comprised of more than 5,000 soldiers on the Siachen, the longest glacier outside the poles. The shift in focus to study the impact of climate change is relatively recent, Pottakkal said. Yet the south Asian nation’s efforts pale in comparison with neighbouring China, which has a network of field stations and more than 850 people working at two major research institutes that monitor glaciers, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ website. Monitoring stations “They’ve set up stations on the glaciers where you can actually live all year long,” Shroder, the Emeritus professor of geography and geology at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, said in an interview. “These are extremely expensive.” India still lacks a dedicated research institute for glacier studies and China’s achievements could be a model, Ramanathan said. However, attracting young scientists is difficult because the pay is low, said Vijay Kumar Raina, former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India. “A chap going to a call center gets paid more than a chap going to a glacier,” Raina, the author of an atlas on Indian glaciers, said via phone from Chandigarh in North India. “Why would someone put up with such cold and difficult conditions when you don’t even pay them enough?” After months of protest by students, India’s government in October agreed to raise stipends for young researchers. Starting stipends for graduate students enrolled in all doctoral programs in India, be it in applied mathematics or glaciology, rose 55% to Rs300,000 a year. Stipends increased That pales in comparison with other nations. A student pursuing a doctorate in glaciology makes 47,000 Swiss francs ($49,000) a year in Switzerland, C$20,500 ($18,000) in Canada and about $14,000 in the US. Still, the fellowship increase comes as a relief for 23- year old Anirudha Mahagaonkar, who was part of the Chhota Shigri expedition, and is pursuing a doctorate at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati. He said he opted for a career in research despite the “immense pressure” from his family to accept a lucrative job offer from Wipro Ltd., one of India’s biggest software exporters. Mahagaonkar came closest to questioning that decision on his last day on the glacier, when his group had to trudge up a snowy slope while avoiding the dozens of crevasses that lay hidden under the snow. The descent was especially treacherous as the steep slope was littered with loose rocks and gravel. ‘Chosen path’ “All it needed was one slip and we would have gone crashing down,” he said that evening at the high camp as he sipped a cup of soup and took off the bulky snowshoes. “It was the scariest experience of my life,” Mahagaonkar is sticking to his chosen path of becoming a glaciologist, though he says the government needs to do more to ensure researchers get recognition. “What we are studying is really important,” he said in a phone interview from his university campus, two weeks after returning from the glacier. “But most people in India just don’t realize how serious things could get if we don’t study glaciers.” Bloomberg

 
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