26: Sizing Up the Melting Glaciers of the Himalayas

There are an estimated 54,000 glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. These glaciers cover 60,000 square kilometers and serve as a major source of the water in the region’s rivers, including as much as 40 percent in the Indus River system - the backbone of agriculture and food production in Pakistan, for example. But in recent decades glaciologists – those who study glaciers – are concerned with how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting, and what that could mean for the more than a billion people downstream who depend on these glaciers for agriculture, fresh water, energy production, and basic livelihood.Smriti Srivastava is a Wilkes Center Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability at the University of Utah.  She has studied Himalayan glaciers throughout her academic and research career, which has included several field expeditions to study the glaciers up close. (Featured image: Smriti Srivastava’s photo of her research team led by Prof. Mohd. Farooq Azam, with the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, while hiking the Drang-Drung Glacier at 5300 m a.s.l in September 2023, one of the largest glaciers in the Himalaya-Karakoram mountain range. Photo credit: Himanshu Kaushik)https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/26-sizing-up-the-melting-glaciers-of-the-himalayas/