Loading…
Uttarakhand has ordered monitoring of all glaciers and glacial lakes in the state after a deadly glacier collapse in Nepal, the disaster management minister Madan Kaushik said, bringing renewed attention on 30 August 2026 to a basin-scale study of hanging glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya.
The study, by researchers from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and IIT Bhubaneswar and published in npj Natural Hazards in April 2026, identified 219 hanging glaciers in Uttarakhand's Alaknanda basin covering 71.7 plus or minus 3.5 sq km.
Their total ice volume is estimated at 2.39 plus or minus 0.42 cubic km, of which 0.74 plus or minus 0.14 cubic km is hanging ice mass; nearly 30 per cent of the basin's unstable ice sits in the upper Alaknanda.
Built-up land exposed to potential avalanche flows in the basin is projected to rise from about 8,000 sq m in 2000 to roughly 152,000 sq m by 2030, and the exposed population from about 380 to about 8,500 over the same period.
A separate ongoing assessment has counted at least 858 hanging glaciers along India's roughly 2,500-km Himalayan stretch.
A hanging glacier begins high on a mountain wall or valley flank and ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff instead of flowing down to the valley floor. Its snout is left perched high above the valley trough, so it sheds mass mechanically - by calving, icefalls and avalanches - rather than by melting through a gentle ablation zone. Two processes create them. When a large trunk glacier in the main valley thins and retreats, the smaller tributary glaciers that once fed it are stranded on the steep sidewalls above the shrunken surface. And as warming lifts the zero-degree isotherm, the permafrost and basal ice that bond the remaining mass to the bedrock thaw, producing meltwater at the bed that acts as a lubricant. A body that was frozen firmly to its slope becomes a body resting on it.
Simple Analogy: It is a slab of ice left clinging to a steep roof after the snow below has slid away, with the frost that glued it to the tiles slowly melting.
The Alaknanda basin lies in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand. The river rises at the Satopanth and Bhagirath Kharak glaciers above Badrinath, gathers the Dhauliganga at Vishnuprayag, the Nandakini at Nandprayag, the Pindar at Karnaprayag and the Mandakini at Rudraprayag, and meets the Bhagirathi at Devprayag to become the Ganga. Nearly 30 per cent of the basin's unstable ice is concentrated in its upper reaches, above the settlements and pilgrimage routes of Chamoli district.
GS Paper 1 > Physical Geography, Glaciation; GS Paper 3 > Disaster and Disaster Management, Environment and Climate Change
General Awareness > Physical Geography of India
Consider the following pairs: Glacier : River 1. Bandarpunch : Yamuna 2. Bara Shigri : Chenab 3. Milam : Mandakini 4. Siachen : Nubra 5. Zemu : Manas Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
Answer: 1, 2 and 4
With reference to the water on the planet Earth, consider the following statements: 1. The amount of water in the rivers and lakes is more than the amount of groundwater. 2. The amount of water in polar ice caps and glaciers is more than the amount of groundwater. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Answer: 2 only
A glacier that originates high on a mountain wall and terminates abruptly at a cliff edge above the valley floor, losing mass mainly by mechanical detachment rather than by surface melting.
A tributary valley whose floor lies well above that of the main valley, left behind when the deeper trunk glacier eroded the main valley faster; it remains after the ice has gone, often with a waterfall at its mouth.
Glacial lake outburst flood - the sudden release of water from a glacial lake when its moraine or ice dam fails, often set off by an avalanche or landslide falling into the lake.
Ground that remains at or below freezing point for at least two consecutive years; in high mountains it helps bond ice and rock to steep slopes, so its thaw destabilises them.
The altitude at which the air temperature is zero degrees Celsius; as it rises with warming, freezing conditions retreat to higher elevations.