The Indus is one of the most meltwater-dependent rivers on Earth, and hosts a large, rapidly growing population and the world’s largest irrigation scheme. Understanding the hydrology of the upper Indus basin is challenging. The Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalayan mountain ranges are difficult to access, hampering field measurements of […]
Philip
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We know very little about glaciers in the high mountains. We know they’re shrinking and temperatures are rising faster at higher altitudes than anywhere else on the planet. But, due to extreme conditions and inaccessibility, we have much to learn. Detailed field measurements are being made on just twelve out […]
Glaciers covered by debris – rocks, dirt, silt, and sand – are common in the Himalayas. Depending on who’s counting (and where you are looking), debris covers nearly 25% of the total glacierized area in the region. Experiments and previous studies have shown that really thin debris enhances melt, but […]
To honor Langtang, the village that was tragically destroyed by an avalanche triggered by the Nepal earthquake of April 2015, we proposed to name a Martian crater after Langtang. The idea was initiated by colleague Tjalling de Haas, who investigates debris flows and land-forms on Mars. The request was officially […]
[Joe is a Senior Glacier Hydrologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal] True fact: there have been not one but two workshops dedicated specifically to the installation of automatic weather stations (AWS) on glaciers. One of the biggest unknowns in how glaciers will respond to […]
Our research team member Arthur Lutz has recently been promoted to Dr Lutz after a successful PhD defence in Utrecht. Congratulations on this achievement!
This year’s EGU General Assembly has passed and we presented a number of topics in 4 different sessions. In a session with numerous outstanding talks on Mountain Climates on Wednesday, Joseph Shea presented initial results from an analysis of glaciological and hydrological sensitivities in modeling in the Hindukush Himalaya region. […]
At the recent Alpine Glaciology Meeting (AGM) 2016 held in Munich we presented some of the ongoing work in the Langtang catchment. Pascal Egli presented his work on the reconstruction of debris thickness on debris covered glaciers from thermal satellite images and meteorological data via an energy balance approach. We […]
In the recent special issue of the Annals of Glaciology on ‘Glaciology in High Mountain Asia’ our research team contributed four papers focused on the surface of debris-covered Lirung Glacier, located in the Langtang Valley in the Nepalese Himalaya. Variation in environmental lapse rate In a study of the distributed air and […]