Himalaya's ‘hanging glaciers’ can cause higher disaster risks in Uttarakhand: Study

These hanging glaciers has increased the exposure of neighbouring populations and infrastructure to significant risks, especially glacier disasters.

The rapidly changing climate has weakened swathes of the Himalayan glaciers and formed unstable chunks of ice that hang off steep slopes and can snap, setting off a slew of environmental disasters in Uttarakhand, a new paper has found.

The Himalayas are hanging by a thread. (Representative image)

The paper – led by the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, and the Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment – mapped 219 of these chunks, known as “hanging glaciers” in Alaknanda basin. These glaciers occupy steep slopes,