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Three researchers with the University of Potsdam report that thousands of natural lakes in the Himalayas are at risk of bursting their moraines due to global warming and causing flooding downriver.

As climate change continues unabated, scientists are trying to predict what might happen around the world. The region of the Himalayas has already seen some dramatic changes—as glaciers melt, natural lakes have formed—85 of them in the Sikkim Himalaya between 2003 and 2010.

To see what might happen as higher temperatures melt Himalaya glaciers, the researchers carried out 5.4 billion simulations based on lake models developed with topographic and satellite data. After running the simulations, they report that they found approximately 5,000 lakes in the Himalayas are likely unstable due to moraine weaknesses.

The melting of Himalayan glaciers has doubled since the turn of the century, with more than a quarter of all ice lost over the last four decades, scientists have revealed. The accelerating losses indicate a “devastating” future for the region, upon which a billion people depend for regular water.

The scientists combined declassified US spy satellite images from the mid-1970s with modern satellite data to create the first detailed, four-decade record of ice along the 2,000km (1,200-mile) mountain chain.

The analysis shows that 8bn tonnes of ice are being lost every year and not replaced by snow, with the lower level glaciers shrinking in height by 5 meters annually. The study shows that only global heating caused by human activities can explain the heavy melting.

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people. Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

Until recently the impact of climate change on the ice in the HKH region was uncertain, said Wester. “But we really do know enough now to take action, and action is urgently needed,” he added.

America’s failings — and, for that matter, Britain’s — were made all the more stark by successes elsewhere. “South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people — a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an essay for the London Review of Books that excoriated the Anglo-American handling of the crisis. “Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus.”

Its struggles may come to mark a historic inflection point: the moment the world’s preeminent superpower had to relinquish a certain vision of its own primacy as other countries — especially some rising powers in Asia — led the way.

“Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm,” wrote Mishra, pointing to both the United States’ punitively expensive health-care system and the hollowing out of Britain’s social services. “It has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.”

Unseasonably heavy rainfall has destroyed crops, washed away bridges and killed dozens of people across India and Nepal in a reminder of the devastation caused by a changing climate.

across the subcontinent, reaching the Himalayas in Nepal and spreading all the way down to the coastal ravines of India’s southwestern peninsula.

India and its neighbors have struggled to square development projects intended to lift millions of people out of poverty with the risks of a changing climate.

Rescue workers recovered 22 bodies on Monday and Tuesday after a nearly 48-hour operation to reach and assess the site of a plane crash in the rocky heights of the Himalayas, according to officials in Nepal.

The flight normally takes about 30 minutes, but the plane went down in bad weather with 13 Nepalis, four Hindu pilgrims from India and two German trekkers on board.

“No one is alive,” said Narendra Shahi, an international mountain guide, who was sent to the crash site as part of the rescue operation. “The plane has crashed into pieces. It’s so heartbreaking.”