Himalayan Glaciers & GLOF Risk
The Himalaya is Asia's frozen water bank, feeding the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra on which nearly two billion people depend. It is thawing faster than at any point in the monitored record: ICIMOD's 2026 stocktake finds the range shedding ice about twice as fast as it did before the millennium, and thinned by as much as 27 metres since 1975. The danger showed its sharpest face on the night of 3 October 2023, when a collapsing moraine emptied Sikkim's South Lhonak lake, wrecked the 1,200 MW Teesta-III dam and killed at least 55 people. India runs a Rs 150-crore GLOF mitigation programme across four Himalayan states, and on 3 September 2026 the Union Home Secretary reviewed five states and union territories on how ready they actually are.
- GLOF
- South Lhonak
- NDMA
- NGRMP
- ICIMOD
- Teesta
- Himalayan glaciers
- black carbon
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