Even the most-resilient glaciers are falling victim to climate change

The resilience of glaciers in the northwestern Pamir mountains, including the Kyzylsu Glacier in Tajikistan, has been well-documented in previous research

Glaciers in Central Asia have long managed to withstand rising temperatures and changing weather patterns. But now, the outlook is worsening.

A study published Tuesday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment finds that a glacier in Tajikistan probably reached its tipping point in 2018, with conditions deteriorating since then. It’s a development that may threaten the long-term water security for tens of millions of people.

“As climate change intensifies, previously spared glaciers are now severely affected as well,” said Achille Jouberton, the report’s lead author and a PhD student at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. “This further shows that this is really a global issue, reaching some of the most remote places.”

The resilience of glaciers in the northwestern Pamir mountains, including the Kyzylsu Glacier in Tajikistan, has been well-documented in previous research. Jouberton and his team are the first to discover that the glaciers’ relatively stable status may have come to an end.

The change is worrisome because the likelihood is “the glaciers will continue to retreat to a point where they can’t supply as much meltwater as before,” Jouberton said. Over time, this may mean reduced water supplies for Tajikistan and much of Central Asia, he said.

The analysis helps fill the information gap for Central Asia. The region’s glaciers haven’t been closely monitored for decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the disappearance of local climate stations.

To better understand the health of the glaciers, the researchers set up a monitoring network in the Kyzylsu catchment in 2021 to collect data about local snowfall and water resources. They then fed the data, together with inputs from so-called climate reanalysis, into computational models to simulate the glacier’s behavior during the 25-year period that ended in 2023.

The study found that the Kyzylsu glacier was more resilient to global warming than those in the Alps and Andes. However, it has shrunk since 2018 when annual precipitation in the area began to significantly decrease. With less snowfall, the glacier failed to form snowpacks thick enough to protect itself from summer heat, which has become more and more intense in recent years.

Today, it’s unclear whether the glacier has passed its no-return point, the researchers said. They are calling for increased monitoring because the glaciers are critical to human livelihoods and ecosystems in the region.

“Central Asia is a semiarid region that’s highly dependent on snow and ice melt for downstream water supply,” said Institute of Science and Technology Austria Professor Francesca Pellicciotti, the study’s coauthor. The Kyzylsu catchment, for instance, is vital to the drainage basin of the Amu Darya where the water originates almost entirely from glaciers.