By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
With its breath-taking landscapes, Langtang is a high-altitude Himalayan valley in north-central Nepal where Yala glacier was declared “dead” recently.
A group of Local people and glaciologists from four glaciated countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) on Tuesday gathered at Langtang to mourn the disappearance of Yala Glacier.
Yala, which has shrunk by 66% and retreated 784M since it was first measured in the 1970s is projected to be among the first Nepali glaciers to join the growing numbers of glaciers declared ‘dead’ worldwide.
Over 50 people, including Buddhist monks and members of local community, and glacier experts from Bhutan, China, India, and Nepal completed the arduous high-altitude trek to attend the “poignant” tribute event on Tuesday (Monday 12th), which featured a Buddhist ceremony, speeches, and the unveiling of two granite memorial plaques which will sit at the foot of where the glacier today stands.
Yala is notable not just for its rapid retreat, but also, thanks to its proximity to Kathmandu relative to other glacierised areas, for the central role it has played in advancing cryosphere research in a region that is known for lacking research capacity.
The glacier has served as a research site for 50 years.
Despite their importance in the provision of water for river flow on which billions of people rely and the fact that mountains in the region hold the largest mass of ice and snowpack outside the two geographic polar regions, glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas are hugely understudied.
Yala is one of just seven glaciers in the entire 3,500km-long arc of the Hindu Kush Himalayas to have been monitored annually for a decade or more and it is one of 38 glaciers with in-situ measurements, providing crucial data on the speed and extent of losses.
Earth’s mountains have lost close to nine trillion tonnes of ice since records began in 1975 – the equivalent of a 2.72-metre thick block of ice the size India. On current melt rates, many glaciers worldwide will not survive the 21st century.
The stones left at the base of the glacier carry messages by two world-famous authors, Manjushree Thapa and Andri Snaer Magnason, in English, Nepali and locally spoken Tibetan. Both authors have also backed ICIMOD’s #SaveOurSnow campaign and asked for their author fees to be donated to local climate action.
Thapa’s inscription states: “Yala, where the gods dream high in the mountains, where the cold is divine. Dream of life in rock, sediment, and snow, in the pulverizing of ice and earth, in meltwater pools the colour of sky. Dream. Dream of a glacier and the civilizations downstream. Entire ecosystems: our own sustenance. The cosmos. And all that we know and all that we love.”
Magnason’s inscription reads: “A message to the future: Yala glacier is one of 54,000 glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, most of which are expected to vanish this century due to global warming. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. May 2025 426ppm CO2 [parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere]”
Yala is the first glacier in Asia and the third glacier worldwide to carry a version of these words by Magnason. Plaques bearing his message also sit at the site of the world’s first glacier funeral, which took place in Magnason’s native Iceland in 2019, for OK Glacier, and at the site of the funeral for Ayoloco glacier in Mexico in 2021.
Funerals have also been held for the Swiss Pizol glacier in 2019, Clark glacier in Oregon in 2020, and Basodino glacier in Switzerland in 2021.
In 2021, ICIMOD, with the United Nations, marked the disappearance of Lemthang Glacier, in Bhutan, which was wiped out by a glacial lake outburst flood in 2017.
The tribute to Yala was organised by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), working with local authority partners, including Gosaikunda Rural Municipality Ward No 4.
“Yala’s accelerating disappearance is totemic of the disastrous deglaciation and loss of snowpack we’re now seeing unfold across Earth’s mountains at a pace that far outstrips scientists’ worst-case scenarios,” said Pema Gyamtsho, Director General ICIMOD.
Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary and special envoy for and chief negotiator on climate change for India, who is attending the Government of Nepal’s Sagarmatha Sambaad event this week said: “I’ve trekked the mountains of the Himalayas for decades. The pace and scale of the deglaciation and loss of snowpack happening now, and which I’ve seen with my own eyes, is truly breathtaking.
“Yala is representative. This issue is not just about glaciers in Nepal. This is happening across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, and the world. We are losing our glaciers. Yala represents the true casualties – all glaciers in Nepal are now receding – of global warming.
“My hope is that by doing this event, now, before the glacier is gone, we will give glacier losses more prominence. There’s still not enough awareness. Personally and professionally, it feels incredibly important to make the sorts of dramatic losses we’re seeing in Yala visible – we felt like we needed to show people the reality. It feels like noone’s paying sufficient attention to this issue and it is so consequential. In the future, maybe people will look back at where the glacier used to be now, and in 2011, and when measurements began, and realise it used to be this big.
“I’m hoping we’re able to make more people aware, and to share what I learned and experienced from Yala, from monitoring this glacier, especially for those who cannot come here and see this for themselves, and to show them that this glacier and the world’s glaciers are our lifelines.”
Source: ICIMOD