Rapid Melting Of Glaciers Wreak Havoc across Gilgit Baltistan.
Rapid melting of glaciers wreaked havoc across Gilgit Baltistan marooning large swathes of cultivated lands and properties and blocking several major roads due to floodwater and consequent landslides.
Climate change has affected the area which faces to the glaciers feeding the river system in Pakistan and in its surroundings.
Two people were killed when a family was hit by floodwaters on the first day of the disaster. Also, floodwaters from the Gonarforam stream hit a mother, her daughter and her son in the Goharabad valley of Diamer district. The mother and daughter drowned in the flow.
A suspension bridge also collapsed in the Niat valley of Diamer district.
Floodwaters from the Gonarforam stream also blocked the Karakoram Highway and inundated large tracks of cultivated land. Traffic between Gilgit-Baltistan and the rest of the country remained suspended as a result.
Flooding and land erosion badly hit the road leading to and from the Hisper valley of Nagar district, thus severing its link with the rest of the country.
Landslides also damaged crops and water channels in the Daskin valley of Astore district.
Floodwaters from rivers and streams blocked link roads, marooning people living in remote parts of Gilgit, Diamer and Baltistan divisions.
Floodwaters poured out of the Batsuwat nullah in the Ishkoman valley of Ghizer district. The flow of the Immit river has been blocked, creating a lake. The upstream areas remained cut off from the rest of the country.
The lake had inundated an area spanning about two kilometers, submerging more than 30 houses, cattle farms, vehicles, and infrastructure, local administration said.
Experts emphasize the need for carrying out hazard and risk assessment of the entire region and establishing early flood warning systems at the village level to help communities fight the challenge.
Land-use planning is important and infrastructure development in areas highly prone to weather events should be avoided.
They suggest plantation of carefully chosen species of trees that could help reduce floods` intensity and cool off glaciers.
Dr. Ghulam Rasul, the director general of Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) says the fast melting glaciers pose the greatest disaster risk to Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral. I see massive deforestation that the region has experienced over the decades as a major factor behind this situation.
The small glacier has been found to be both retreating and advancing in recent years, a natural behavior. `Part of it recently fell and blocked the river. Since it broke off from a fairly high altitude, it caused damage,` he said.
Dr. Rasul is concerned over the rising incidents of glacial lake outburst floods and links it to rising temperature of the region. Sharing some climatic data, he said while the temperature in the whole country had risen by one-degree centigrade, the Gilgit-Baltistan region had witnessed an increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade.
Dr. Babar Khan, the regional head of World Wide for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) who was earlier looking after the Gilgit-Baltistan region on behalf of his organisation, said that though the recent glacier melting, the resulting formation of a lake and subsequent flooding was not a new phenomenon, there was a need to take into account the factors causing it.
`Over the past two weeks, the temperature has increased in the region. Daytime has been hot while temperature significantly drops in the evenings.
`If you see over 100 years of PMD data, you will realize that winters in the region are getting shorter and summers getting longer and hotter.
`The overall weather pattern is changing. Earlier, the winter peak season was November to January with heavy snowfall. Now, it has shifted towards January, February, and March.
This year snowfall was in April. The result is that the snow is not getting converted into ice,` he explained.
According to him, it`s actually the partially compacted snow that melts rapidly with increase in temperature and results in flooding.
Climate change, he said, was no longer a myth but a reality. `The sooner we realize this the better.
There is a need for creating public awareness, carrying out hazard and risk assessments of the entire region, restricting land-use and going for plantation campaigns.
`We must take help from latest technology as well and opt for community-based early flood warning systems.
Don`t cut the existing vegetation and plant more, for instance, sea buckthorn, a plant that helps trap large slit and controls erosion apart from having many medicinal properties,` he said.
Most of the glaciers in the region, he said, were black because of high debris content, another reason for their rapid melting as they absorbed radiation more.
`Mountains have permafrost, perennially frozen ground, which should be studied so that their role in climate change is understood better,` he said.
