A glacier to be
Snow falls and piles, and by the forces of gravity and the patience of time, snow turns into firn, into ice. Within this mass, a piped network of meltwater rumbles and forges a path through the freeze, connecting atmospheric systems with groundwater channels. And in this way, the glacier is a self-watering throat. Under summer heat, ice melts into freshwater, draining through the pipes and pouring into the bellies of oceans, rivers, and human settlements that depend on it for life. It’s parched when winter comes, and the glacier is allowed to rest and hope that this season of accumulation will be enough to sustain it for another summer of loss.
A glacier up close is a tremendous front, one that can outlive eons just to crumble before your eyes. It’s not always easy to see a glacier up close. Many in the Karakoram are notoriously untouched by humans, though one-fifth of the world’s population drink from their meltwater streams. Uplifted by the groundbreaking collision of tectonic plates, the Karakoram mountain range traverses Tajikistan, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. It’s perpetually shrouded in clouds and named “Bami-Dunya” – the roof of the world. With its tallest peak, K2, reaching 8,611 meters into the heavens and second only to Everest, the Karakoram is a monument of geologic time and geopolitical symbolism. It is a realm frosted with alpine glaciers stretching over 70 kilometers, among the longest and most extensive of their kind outside the polar regions. These glaciers ooze down ragged slopes and carve rounded valleys, sliding over landscapes of every topographic signature. Each a character in their own right, the glaciers are alive.
Responding to multiple seasonal weather systems, Karakoram glaciers are known to be unpredictable in their movements and behaviors. Glaciers in the Pakistani region, in particular, are known to surge. Fast-forward through satellite imagery captured over the decades and the sprawl of glacial neurons in this area expands and contracts to varying rhythms. Following a melody only they know, Baltoro Glacier cha-chas and the Siachen waltzes, amidst an eclectic mix of other dances. In the high reaches of central Karakoram, the glaciers at times advance and at times retreat, and it’s especially curious when they stop to strike a pose. The dance seems to come to a standstill for the span of decades only to continue again with rigor.
A glacier advances when it has accumulated more mass than it has lost, and so it stretches further into the landscape. A glacier retreats when it has melted or broken off more than it could accumulate, and so it becomes truncated. Glaciers gain and lose mass seasonally, advancing and retreating every year; exactly how much depends on their surrounding environment. In this way, a glacier’s mass is a delicate balance and surges can be devastating. Characterized by quickened ice flow and rapid thinning of the glacier, a surge reveals instability in the glacial system that has caused it to buckle and slip. The base of the glacier develops cracks and crevasses where it crumbles, creating stretch marks on the surface as ice is transported downstream at speeds 10 to 100 times faster than normal. Ice can flow like this for a few months or a few years and, in that time, a surging glacier can cover hundreds of meters of ground before stopping as suddenly as it started.
In the summer of 2005, the Baltoro Glacier in central Karakoram surged again. The Baltoro extends east to west for 62 kilometers, with smaller tributary glaciers flowing into it in a gentle meander beneath K2. Debris from landslides along surrounding valley slopes covers much of Baltoro’s lower reaches. This dark layer of debris affects the temperature of a glacier, by way of darker surfaces absorbing more heat than lighter surfaces. Thin debris cover is a metal rod, efficiently transferring atmospheric heat to the glacier, causing it to sweat. Thick debris cover, however, is aluminum foil insulating the glacier and keeping it cool. For Baltoro Glacier, its debris layer was thick enough to not only prevent it from melting, but actually allow it to thicken. The glacier, however, may have thickened beyond comfort.
The previous winter in the Karakoram brought an unusual, record-long period of snowfall that likely tipped the Baltoro Glacier’s mass balance. While debris layer created cool insulation at the surface, the glacier had thickened to the extent that it began trapping heat underneath and was melting itself from below. As meltwater accumulated in this subglacial environment, it created upwards pressure against the glacier. Baltoro was eventually lifted by its own melt. And like an ice cube that formed a puddle, it began to slide, taking with it kilometers of ice in a stunning feat of glaciology.
Beyond a scientific wonder and an agent of change, Karakoram glaciers can be realms of geopolitical obsession. South of Baltoro Glacier, the Siachen Glacier winds for 75 kilometers into the triangular pocket between China to the north and Pakistan and India on either side. It’s a feature of little strategic value and yet, it has witnessed feuds and fatalities, and gunfire and cricket games, becoming an emblem of Pakistan and India’s greater dispute over the relic kingdom of Kashmir. An expanse at 5,653 meters above sea level where temperatures can fall below -55oC, Siachen is a desolate battlefield where Pakistani and Indian troops have been stationed since 1984. Avalanches and gaping crevasses swallow more soldiers than gunfire, frostbite severs trigger fingers, and the eerie groans of moving ice evoke mirages that guide souls over the edge. Thousands of lives have been lost here and, as one Pakistani soldier says, “It is a battle just to survive.”
The Siachen War erupted in 1984 and was waged until a cease-fire in 2003. Occupation of Siachen Glacier sparked from a geographic detail in the 1949 United Nations agreement that ended the First Indo-Pakistani War. The agreement established an arcuate 800-kilometer cease-fire line that terminated with coordinate NJ 9842, at a city in Kashmir and at the base of Siachen Glacier. Siachen was, at the time, a no-man’s-land and no one had considered delineating the cease-fire line over it. Certainly, no one had expected that the newfound peace would break and bleed into the mountains four decades later and last another 20 years.
But the claim for Siachen came. In 1977, an Indian colonel chanced upon a magazine feature about an international expedition onto Siachen from the Pakistani side. Four years later, he assembled a team and secretly scaled the glacier. A pack of discarded Indian ‘Gold Flake’ cigarettes, however, alerted Pakistani troops of the colonel’s presence. But by the time Pakistan made their own ascent in 1984, an Indian battalion of 300 men were already there. While militant encounters over Siachen have since stopped and with some progress made, the legacies of distrust and deceit between the two nations linger in an icy test of diplomacy.
The burden of history has been shouldered by a glacier with a novel absurdity that war has been waged here. For a monument that would otherwise not exist in elevations where most cultures find comfort, has anyone considered what to do should Siachen advance? Or perhaps more daunting, what if Siachen melts? Without this barricade, what would happen between Pakistan and India in the face of sudden proximity, on neither this side nor that, and in awkward need of more immediate cooperation? As Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman put it, “If [we] cannot solve a dispute over a chunk of ice…how can we fix more complex issues like Kashmir?”
A glacier is a chunk of ice and a source of water, a political stage or an image from space. A glacier is at once fragile and fierce, almighty yet already gone. Like a “great plough, [they] grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth.” Such was natural historian and glaciologist Louis Agassiz’s description of the might and expression of glaciers. Karakoram is a mystical land and icescape unlike any other. Where weather systems and tectonic uplift meet glacial processes and human nature, it’s an ecosystem of behaviors and adaptation. To think how easily an ice cube melts at room temperature or how quickly ice cream loses its structural integrity, to become and be a glacier is phenomenal. And what stories to have made, witnessed, and held secret as a glacier in the Karakoram.