Hot summer fuels dangerous glacier melting in Central Asia

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan: It began with a low rumbling noise. Then the rivers of mud poured down the mountainside over the Tajik village of Barssem — the latest victim of shrinking glaciers that are an alarming portent of climate change in Central Asia.
“The gorge was filled by a terrible noise - the roar of stones,” said villager Shakarbek Kurbonbekov.
“The mud took everything in its path - homes, cars,” he told AFP by telephone. “Those that could, escaped to higher ground. There was no time to think.”
The 60-year-old man survived the disaster that hit the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan’s mountainous eastern regions last month, but many others didn’t — the mudslides and flooding claimed at least 12 lives and destroyed close to one hundred homes.
The wave of destruction that started with a heatwave on July 16 is a harbinger of the broader ecological change looming over landlocked Central Asia, a fractured region that relies on a stock of rapidly melting glaciers for long-term survival.
The glaciers in Tajikistan’s Pamir range and the nearby Tien-Shan range in Kyrgyzstan feed the strategic Amu and Syr rivers respectively, irrigating farmland that populations have depended on for centuries. They are receding rapidly.
According to a study published last week by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, the glacier stock in the Tien-Shan range is shrinking at four times the pace of the global average in recent decades.
The study’s authors claim half the Tien-Shan’s glaciers — already diminished by over a quarter from their 1961 size — will melt away by 2050.
Evidence of warming of the Tien-Shan, which straddles Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and China, is also seen in the region’s mostly Soviet-built ski resorts.
Oleg Chernogorski, a tour operator with three decades of experience working in the region’s mountains calls climate change “an undeniable fact” after seeing the season begin later and later over the past three decades.