GILGIT-BALTISTAN has emerged as Pakistan’s climate ground zero. For decades, the country’s climate emergency was narrated from its floodplains: Sindh’s submerged villages, Punjab’s swollen tributaries, the 2010 and 2022 disasters. These were the consequences of a deeper story. The origin has abruptly moved upstream. GB is no longer the water tower that occasionally leaks. It is where the Indus system’s first disasters now begin, not where they arrive.

Heatwaves once confined to Sindh’s cities and Punjab’s plains now reach the Upper Indus Basin (UIB). In June 2026 alone, the Met Office issued its second Glof (glacial lake outburst flood) alert of the month, warning that sustained high temperatures across GB and KP were accelerating glacier and snowfield melt to the point that existing lakes were expanding and new ones forming in real time.

This follows a pattern of near-annual escalation: in August 2025, a Glof from the Shishper glacier tore through Hassanabad Nullah in Hunza, severing the Karakoram Highway, in the highest-volume event since 2018. Each year now sets its own benchmark.

Underneath the visible flooding sits a less visible mechanism. Central Karakoram’s glaciers are not simply shrinking the way the Himalayan glaciers to their east are; some have been stable or even advancing since 1990 — a documented anomaly.

But stability at the surface has not meant stability underneath. Meltwater cuts channels through the ice itself, moving downward by gravity, forming englacial tunnels that destabilise glaciers from within even where their outward mass looks intact.

That is why river........

© Dawn