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Glaciers, EFE photo
The melting of the third pole, the largest deposit of frozen water after the north and south poles due to the climate crisis, < strong>threatens the more than 7,000 glaciers that are home to Pakistan and endangers millions of peopleThey are watching the magnitude and frequency of flooding increase.
Pakistan has some of the largest amounts of glacial ice in the world outside the polar regions, concentrated mainly in the northern provinces, where great mountain ranges such as the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and the Karakorum converge, all of them part of what is popularly known as the third pole of the Earth.
But the rapid increase in temperatures caused by global warming does nothing more than reduce their size, melting the glaciers, and forming new glacial lakes that could overflow in the future.
According to the Pakistan Meteorological Department, the country is already home to 3,044 lakes of this nature, of which 33 are likely to cause severe flooding that would affect more than 7 million people.
CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
Although glacial lake outbursts occur naturally, the recent increase in their magnitudeand their frequency has drawn attention in this South Asian nation.
“The melting of the glaciers is a climatic catastrophe that we are facing right now,” The Minister of Climate Change of Pakistan, Sherry Rehman, told Efe.
A challenge that “is not a danger of the future, it is of today”, he continued, asking that the rest of the countries collaborate with Pakistan to reduce the effects that the climate crisis is having on their territory.
Although Pakistan’s contribution to emissions global is less than 1%, it is among the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change.
The last of these floods took place a few weeks ago, when a glacial lake overflowed and razó in a matter of hours with more than a dozen houses, a bridge and numerous properties in the Hunza Valley, close to the Karakorum.
“I only had a house that was swept away by the flood,” one of the flood victims told Efe. Gulraiz Khan, indicating that he and his family value leaving the region permanently due to the persistent danger of similar floods in the future.
His case is not the only one. A study published in 2019 by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) revealed: that at least a third of the glaciers in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain ranges are doomed to melt, affecting millions of people in several South Asian countries.
A risk that Pakistani experts also warn, who They demand more practical measures from the authorities to save the glaciers and protect the population from the consequences of climate change.
In fact, the Meteorological Department from Pakistan warned that last March was the hottest in the last 61 years, registering an average maximum temperature of 30.9 degrees, five degrees above normal.
FORM NEW GLACIERS
One of the voices demanding more protection for the glaciers is that of the director and climate expert at the University of Baltistan, Zakir Hussain, who affirms that the northern region of “Gilgit-Baltistan , which is also known as the third pole for its glaciers, is the most affected by climate change in Pakistan and nobody pays attention to it.
beyond To stop the increase in temperatures, Hussain proposes the artificial formation of new glaciers, a technique already used by local communities with the aim of creating small masses of ice from which be able to obtain water for crops.
The expert explains that the locals have been celebrating these “glacier weddings” for several centuries, where they move a piece of two glaciers to a cave or deep well in a mountain, where they join them and cover them with mud and stones, after what will be born a new glacier after ten or twelve years.
And it is that the local communities consider that these gigantic masses of ice are living beings, and even distinguish between men – those of gray color and with Hussain continues.
The development of this method would be key for a country that suffers from a shortage of Like Pakistan, since glaciers are a main source of water for rivers, such as the Indus, on whose flow 220 million people depend from its source on the Tibetan plateau to its It flows into the Arabian Sea.
“When we talk about caring for glaciers, people laugh because they think that glaciers are not alive and cannot give birth, but they do. and they need care like a child”, says Hussain.