AN SOS FROM THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

Earth’s frozen zones are among our most breathtaking landscapes.  But the survival of these magical realms of snow and ice now hangs in the balance.  Even the ice of the tallest mountain range in the world, the vast highland crescent of the Hindu Kush Himalaya, is now suffering unprecedented losses.  

 As home to hundreds of millions of people, habitat for some of Earth’s hardiest and most unusual lifeforms, source of freshwater for one quarter of humanity, the consequences of these losses are vast.  These majestic mountains, about a hundred of them soaring above 7,000 metres, hold so much ice that scientists call them ‘the third pole’. Cold is so intrinsic to their identity that the very name Himalaya is Sanskrit for ‘abode of snow’.  

But the mountains here saw so little snowfall this year that it was dubbed a snow drought. Without winter, and as temperatures rise, the snowline is rising ever higher, leaving mountains once white now black and grey. The channels once carved by vast, slow-moving rivers of ice stand as dry, empty riverbeds.

A meteorological system gone haywire, meanwhile, has inundated steep slopes with extreme rain, falling on thawing permafrost, and early snowmelt, to unleash devastating floods, landslides, and rivers of debris.

It is time for all of us who care about Earth’s frozen mountain zones, their human populations, and biodiversity to step up to protect them and ourselves. To Save Earth, we need to call for our leaders to Save Our Snow.

Steering ourselves from an unliveable future may be humanity’s greatest summit yet.

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