Vanishing ice, rising risks As Central Asia’s glaciers disappear, a new generation of scientists works to track them
Vanishing ice, rising risks As Central Asia’s glaciers disappear, a new generation of scientists works to track them
Amid record-breaking temperatures, glaciers worldwide have been steadily melting away, leaving scientists with the difficult task of documenting their disappearance. In Central Asia’s Tian Shan Mountains, these rivers of ice have been retreating for decades, shrinking faster than the global average and posing a threat to the region’s water supply. This has brought about shifts in policy, agricultural production, and even geopolitical ties, as countries like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and their neighbors try to find new ways to tackle the fallout from the climate crisis. And what better way to impress the importance of glaciers upon the next generation than to trek up into the mountains to see them close up? Journalist Diana Kruzman reports for The Beet.
This story first appeared in The Beet, a monthly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Sign up here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.
On a clear day in late August, Sabrina Muzafari stepped onto the tongue of the Golubin glacier, a river of ice framed by the mountains of Ala-Archa National Park, a few hours south of Bishkek. Following behind her were 10 young women from across Central Asia who had come to learn about the science behind glaciers and test their mountaineering chops.
This yearly expedition, known as “Adventure of Science” and mainly funded by the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, aims to draw more women and girls from the region into high-mountain environments — like Muzafari herself, who participated in the program in 2019 and is now an instructor. Some might go on to work in STEM or outdoor recreation, but no matter their future professions, all would be inspired to think about the importance of glaciers, which most people never get to see in their lifetimes.
“No view can put you in such awe as a giant mass of ice and snow,” Muzafari told The Beet. “So majestic, so moving. And imagine walking on it!”
But as the girls trekked further up Golubin, snow crunching underneath their crampons, they came across something unexpected. Rather than blindingly white, the surface of the ice was pink. At more than 3,300 meters (10,800 feet) above sea level, this part of the glacier was supposed to remain frozen, even in the summer. But the warm weather was melting the surface layer of snow and encouraging the growth of reddish microbes that absorbed even more sunlight, further melting the ice. It looked, Muzafari thought, like the glacier was bleeding.
Rivers of ice
Central Asia’s glaciers are known as the region’s “water tower.” They store valuable fresh water, locking it away as ice in the winter and releasing it slowly throughout the summer to supply major cities like Bishkek, Tashkent, Dushanbe, and Almaty. But all across Central Asia, these glaciers are shrinking, as manmade pressures like pollution and burning fossil fuels accelerate natural changes in the earth’s climate since the end of the last Ice Age.
In the Tian Shan mountain range, 97 percent of glaciers retreated between the 1960s and the 2010s, with some disappearing completely. For countries that rely on this water for agriculture and energy, the disappearance of these glaciers is cause for concern, leading to shifting geopolitical alliances. And it’s saddling scientists with the difficult task of documenting the ice that’s being lost, in preparation for a drier future.
“Climate change is a big challenge in the region,” said Tobias Siegfried, a Swiss water resources expert who studies the impacts of climate change on water stress in Central Asia. “But these are slow onset changes, which don’t happen overnight. They can be dealt with when we understand what might be coming with the best available knowledge and science, and then anticipate these changes and plan accordingly.”
A glacier is not a static object; it’s constantly moving downhill under the pressure of its own weight, accumulating more snow near its top even as its edge, known as the “tongue,” melts and shrinks. Therefore, measuring long-term changes is a complicated endeavor, requiring researchers to hike up through treacherous mountain passes and brave unpredictable weather to measure the depth of the ice at various points throughout the year.
In the winter, glaciers go through what’s known as accumulation: layers of falling snow compact each other, adding pressure until the oldest snow at the bottom is squeezed into ice, adding to the overall mass. Then, in the summer, sunlight and warmer air melt the surface layers, causing the glacier to shrink — a process known as ablation. Over a year, as the ice that melts in the summer is replaced in the winter, the change in a glacier’s mass — its “mass balance” — should typically be close to zero. Instead, mass balance measurements from glaciers like Golubin have been consistently negative for decades.
Golubin is one of 45 alpine “reference glaciers,” which scientists rely on to track global changes in glacier activity. Russian scientists took the first measurements here in 1861, and Soviet researchers began long-term continuous monitoring in the 1960s. In a 2022 study, the Central Asian Institute of Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Bishkek found that, on average, Golubin’s surface area lost an amount of ice equivalent to 0.16 meters (about half a foot) of water every year between 1900 and 2020; its tongue, meanwhile, had retreated by 1.4 kilometers (0.87 miles) since 1860.
The melting ice has made the Adventure of Science team’s treks “longer and more difficult,” according to Muzafari. “Glacier rivers fill up quickly with water when temperatures start to rise during the day, and it can become very challenging to cross them,” she explained.
The factors behind the glaciers' retreat are complex. It began around 1850, with the end of a period of cooler weather called the “Little Ice Age.” Over the past 40 years, however, the shift has been much more rapid than at any previous point in recorded history. Global temperatures have warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius (about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) from the preindustrial era, making 2024 the hottest year on record and accelerating the retreat of mountain glaciers and polar ice sheets.
Glaciers in the Tian Shan Mountains, meanwhile, are shrinking four times faster than the global average, as an international team of researchers led by the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences wrote in a 2015 paper. The study found that these glaciers lost 27 percent of their mass from 1961 to 2012, largely due to warming temperatures.
Environmental activists warn that mining activities have also degraded glaciers, not only by physically removing ice but also by dispersing pollutants that settle on the glacier surfaces. These pollutants diminish the glaciers’ reflective capacity, leading to more rapid warming. According to the GFZ-led team’s calculations, if summer temperatures warm by an additional two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the next 30 years, half of the Tian Shan’s total glacier ice volume could be lost by the 2050s.
This loss would have dire consequences for the region’s water supply, as scientists like Abror Gafurov, a hydrologist at GFZ who was not involved with the 2015 research, have warned. “There will be a lot less water in the future [if the] glaciers disappear,” Gafurov said.
Changing hydropolitics
During Soviet times, the government built an interconnected system of hydropower dams and reservoirs to collect the water from melting glaciers, snowmelt, and rainfall. Since Central Asian nations achieved independence, however, national borders have made sharing that water more difficult.
While upstream countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan want to keep their reservoirs full to generate electricity for heating in the winter, downstream nations like Uzbekistan need water to be released in the summer to irrigate thirsty crops. This has led to a complex system of agreements, with upstream countries pledging to release more water during the summer in exchange for countries like Uzbekistan sending gas to heat their neighbors’ homes during the winter.
Now, a reduction in water levels is putting strain on this delicate balance. Although the shrinking glaciers are releasing more water into the region’s rivers as they melt, other changes have counteracted the extra flow. Last spring, for example, the Toktogul Reservoir in Kyrgyzstan approached “critical” levels, as abnormally cold weather kept water locked up as snow in the mountains. Population growth, hotter summers, and more erratic rainfall patterns are also putting stress on the water supply, leading Kyrgyz authorities to declare a three-year energy emergency in August 2023.
With glacial meltwater expected to diminish after reaching “peak” melt sometime around 2050, policymakers now have to prepare for an even more water-scarce future. “Central Asian countries should adapt their strategies for the future in order to be able to use limited water resources,” Gafurov told The Beet, alluding to agricultural production as a sector ripe for innovation.
So far, the response from Central Asian governments has been to build more reservoirs — aiming to capture and store every last drop of water for when it’s needed most. Countries like Uzbekistan are also experimenting with water-saving technologies like drip irrigation, aimed at reducing demand for irrigation water and making it more efficient.
But the looming threat of drought has also led to some geopolitical realignments; rather than competing, upstream and downstream countries have started collaborating to ensure future water security, as University of Central Asia researcher Asel Murzakulova has observed.
“It will be many years before these dams will be constructed,” Murzakulova said during a talk at Columbia University last November. “They need more proactive, faster decisions, and this leads to new interlinkages, which the region hasn’t had before.”
‘We use water poorly’
Other effects of melting glaciers are already being felt. Some river basins fed almost entirely by glacial melt, such as the Ak-Suu in the western part of the Chüy Valley (where Bishkek is located), are already experiencing diminished flows from glaciers that are past their peak. This offers a snapshot of what could occur across the region in the future, says Ryskul Usubaliev, head of the Climate, Water and Geoecology department at CAIAG.
According to Usubaliev, this is unexpected for a country that, unlike others in the region, does not rely on its neighbors for water; all of the rivers in Kyrgyzstan originate within its borders. “Sometimes we use water very irrationally,” he told The Beet. “We have lots of water, but we use it poorly.”
While glacial meltwater typically peaks in late July and early August, runoff is already starting earlier and peaking from early to mid-July, forcing farmers to adapt their planting schedules and anticipate drier conditions during the critical late summer period before the harvest. More precipitation, meanwhile, is falling as rain rather than snow, further diminishing the amount of meltwater available in the summer months.
Melting glaciers also create lakes that can burst through ice dams and spill onto nearby population centers, a phenomenon known as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs, for short). A GLOF in the Shohimardan valley, on the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, killed more than 100 people in July 1998, while 23 died in a similar flood in the Shakhdara valley in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains in 2002. GLOFs have since become more frequent in Central Asia, as well as in other high-mountain areas like the Himalayas, leaving authorities scrambling to develop early-warning systems.
As Central Asia comes face to face with these compounding challenges, scientists’ role in documenting the shrinking glaciers will only grow more important. Funding has been scarce since Kyrgyzstan gained independence, Usubaliev said, but support from international donors has allowed monitoring to resume after an initial decline in the 1990s.
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, funding to study glaciers practically ceased, or little was allocated to the specialists who used to work on it,” Usubaliev recalled. “We were able to restore these gaps and begin the monitoring of glaciers again. I think this is our biggest achievement: after gaining independence, we were able to organize monitoring in almost all parts of the country.”
Researchers like Gafurov, meanwhile, are focused on using remote sensing systems to help farmers anticipate how much water they’ll receive in a given growing season, allowing them to plan for and reduce potential crop losses. Gafurov also suggested that countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan should rethink their agricultural strategies to focus less on cash crops like cotton.
“Maybe that’s not the best option for them for the future, due to the limited available water resources,” Gafurov said. “They might want to focus on other, less water-demanding economic developments.”
For educators like Muzafari, preparing for the future means educating the next generation about the importance of glaciers, as well as the need for global action to combat climate change. “This year's expedition got us 10 girls closer to our goals,” Muzafari said. “We are hopeful [that] they will spread the effect in their communities. The work is ongoing.”
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.
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Story by Diana Kruzman for The Beet
Edited by Eilish Hart