IN contrast to last year’s catastrophic floods, this year’s monsoon flows drained through the plains of Pakistan without wreaking a major disaster. Nonetheless, the highlands of Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral did not remain unaffected.

Not too far away, Nepal experienced a horrific disaster in August. The Himalayan nation endured one of its worst catastrophes when a huge mass of glacial ice and rock collapsed down a slope in the Himalayas near the Langtang region. Within half an hour, it caused an unprecedented surge — as high as nine metres — in the Bhote Koshi/Trishuli river system. Over 1,400 people died. Thousands more went missing. A month later, a massive section of the mountainside collapsed into the swollen Kali Gandaki River after days of heavy rain, sending enormous quantities of soil, rock and debris into the water. This wave of floods and landslides caused at least two dozen deaths.

Pakistan, China, India, Nepal, and Bhutan lie along the axis of disaster — the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) mountain system, also referred to as the ‘Third Pole’ because of its massive concentration of ice and glaciers. These water towers of Asia feed 10 major river systems and........

© Dawn