BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 25 of 150

Correct — B, Yala Glacier. Yala lies in the Langtang valley of Rasuwa district in central Nepal, at roughly 5,170 to 5,750 metres, and on 12 May 2025 a memorial ceremony widely reported as a 'glacier funeral' was held for it. A granite plaque was installed carrying an inscription by the Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason — the same author who wrote the 2019 plaque for Iceland's Okjokull, the world's first glacier memorial. Yala was the glacier chosen for the gesture because its decline is documented rather than merely asserted: it is one of the most intensively studied glaciers in the Himalaya and a long-running field-training site for glaciologists, and the record shows its surface area down about 66 per cent since 1974 and its terminus retreated 784 metres, measured at roughly 1.6 sq km in 2021. The word 'dead' in the question is technical, not poetic, and this is the part worth carrying away. A glacier is not simply ice; it is ice thick enough to deform and flow downhill under its own weight. When a body of ice thins past that threshold it stops moving, becomes stagnant or 'dead' ice, and is struck off the glacier inventory. Iceland's Okjokull failed that test in 2014 and was memorialised on 18 August 2019 with a plaque, 'A letter to the future', that records the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of that month — 415 parts per million. The timing of the Yala ceremony was not incidental either: the United Nations had designated 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and had established 21 March as the World Day for Glaciers, observed for the first time that March, so a memorial in May 2025 landed inside a year-long global campaign. One thing this card deliberately will not tell you: several institutions were credited in press reporting with conducting the ceremony, but no primary source we could check names the organiser, so we do not name one either. The date, the place and the glacier are solid; the organiser is not, and inventing it would be teaching a guess. Neither Khumbu nor Imja has been declared dead, which leaves (b) alone. BPSC recorded no remark against this item when it disposed of candidate objections on 31 October 2025.

• (a)Khumbu Glacier — The reflex answer, because Khumbu is the one Nepali glacier almost every candidate can name. It is Nepal's longest, about 17 km, running from the Western Cwm below Everest down to roughly 4,900 m in Solukhumbu; the Khumbu Icefall at its head is the first great obstacle on the South Col route and Everest Base Camp sits on the ice at about 5,364 m. It is thinning and closely monitored, but no funeral was held for it.
• (c)Imja Glacier — Genuinely in the news for years, but for the opposite reason. Imja's retreat, also in the Everest region, has produced Imja Tsho at about 5,010 m — one of the fastest-growing glacial lakes in Nepal and a textbook glacial lake outburst flood hazard, which the Nepal Army lowered by about three metres in 2016 to cut the risk. A candidate recalling 'Imja: climate emergency in Nepal' is recalling the lake, not a death notice.
• (d)More than one of the above — This needs at least two of the three glaciers to have been declared dead in May 2025, and only Yala was memorialised. It is a live key elsewhere on this paper — Q21 and Q30 both settle on it — so it cannot be dismissed as filler, but here it is arithmetic: one funeral, one glacier, one option.

A glacier is defined by motion. Snow accumulates in an upper accumulation zone, compacts into ice, and the mass becomes thick enough to deform and creep downhill; lower down, in the ablation zone, ice is lost to melting and sublimation, and the line where gain equals loss is the equilibrium line. That budget is the whole science: when accumulation exceeds ablation the glacier advances, and when ablation wins for long enough the ice thins, the terminus retreats, and eventually the remaining ice is too thin to flow at all — at which point glaciologists call it dead ice and remove it from the inventory. 'Declared dead' is therefore a measurable finding about movement, not a figure of speech. The stakes are regional. The Hindu Kush Himalaya, the mountain belt running from Afghanistan through Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and China to Myanmar, holds the largest store of ice outside the polar regions, which is why it is called the Third Pole, and it feeds ten major river basins including the Indus, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra on which roughly two billion people depend. ICIMOD's 2023 assessment of the region found its glaciers losing mass far faster through the 2010s than in the preceding decade and projected that up to 80 per cent of glacier volume could be gone by 2100 on a high-emissions path. The nearest danger, though, is not scarcity but violence: meltwater ponds behind loose moraine dams, and when such a dam fails the result is a glacial lake outburst flood.

Nothing here can be derived. It is recall of one dated news event, so the useful work is knowing which of the three names the story actually attached to — and the fastest route is to sort the three by what each is famous FOR. Khumbu is famous for Everest: the icefall, the base camp, the climbing route. Imja is famous for its lake, Imja Tsho, a glacial lake outburst hazard so serious that the Nepal Army partially drained it in 2016. Yala is famous for measurement — decades of monitoring and a field school where a generation of South Asian glaciologists learned to read a mass balance. Now ask which reputation a funeral would attach itself to. A memorial ceremony is a statement made with data; it needs a glacier whose decline has been recorded for fifty years, not one whose fame rests on mountaineering or on a hazard map. That is Yala, and that reasoning recovers the answer even when the headline itself has slipped. A second anchor is the year: 2025 was the UN's International Year of Glaciers' Preservation, with the first World Day for Glaciers on 21 March 2025, so a Himalayan glacier memorial in May 2025 was part of a campaign rather than an isolated event. The trap is (a), and it is strong precisely because Khumbu is both famous and plausible. The other trap is (d), which needs two funerals where there was one. Finally, a Bihar student has a stake in this that the paper never mentions: the Langtang Khola, which drains Yala's valley, feeds the Trishuli, which joins the Kali Gandaki to form the Narayani, which enters India as the Gandak, runs down through West Champaran and joins the Ganga opposite Patna. Yala's meltwater is Bihar's river water.

• Yala Glacier lies in the Langtang valley of Rasuwa district in central Nepal, between roughly 5,170 m and 5,750 m; the memorial ceremony reported as a glacier funeral was held on 12 May 2025.
• The memorial is a granite plaque inscribed by the Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason, who also wrote the plaque for Iceland's Okjokull — the world's first glacier memorial, installed on 18 August 2019 and recording that month's atmospheric carbon dioxide of 415 parts per million. Okjokull had been pronounced no longer a glacier in 2014.
• Yala's documented decline: surface area down about 66 per cent since 1974, terminus retreated 784 metres, and an area of roughly 1.6 sq km measured in 2021. It is among the most intensively studied glaciers in the Himalaya and a long-standing field-training site.
• The United Nations designated 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and established 21 March as the World Day for Glaciers, first observed on 21 March 2025.
• What the distractors are actually known for: Khumbu is Nepal's longest glacier at about 17 km, carrying the Khumbu Icefall and Everest Base Camp at about 5,364 m; Imja's retreat created Imja Tsho at about 5,010 m, one of Nepal's fastest-growing glacial lakes, lowered by about three metres by the Nepal Army in 2016 to reduce outburst-flood risk.

• Answering Khumbu because it is the Nepali glacier everyone can name — that is the Everest glacier, and no funeral was held for it
• Confusing Imja with the news it actually generates: Imja Tsho is an outburst-flood hazard, not a dead glacier
• Reading 'dead' as rhetoric — it is a technical finding that the ice no longer flows, the same test that retired Okjokull in 2014

BPSC takes one dated headline and asks which proper noun it belongs to — a glacier, a month, a verdict. Fifteen seconds for anyone who read the news that May, unguessable for anyone who did not, and worthless the year after. UPSC almost never asks whose funeral it was. It asks where a named glacier lies, as in 2020 with Siachen and the Nubra valley, or which river a named glacier feeds, as in 2019 with Bandarpunch and the Yamuna against Zemu and the Teesta — questions still valid a decade later. The shared ground is a working stock of named Himalayan glaciers; BPSC wants the news attached to the name, UPSC wants the geography.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The world's first glacier memorial, unveiled with a plaque titled ‘A letter to the future’, commemorated which glacier ?

  • (a)Okjokull, Iceland
  • (b)Pizol, Switzerland
  • (c)Yala, Nepal
  • (d)Ayoloco, Mexico

  Answer(a) Okjokull, Iceland — pronounced no longer a glacier in 2014 and memorialised on 18 August 2019 with a plaque written by Andri Snaer Magnason recording 415 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pizol in Switzerland (2019), Ayoloco in Mexico (2021) and Yala in Nepal (2025) followed.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The United Nations designated 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and also established a World Day for Glaciers. Which date is observed as the World Day for Glaciers ?

  • (a)21 March
  • (b)22 April
  • (c)5 June
  • (d)11 December

  Answer(a) 21 March — first observed on 21 March 2025. The other dates belong to Earth Day (22 April), World Environment Day (5 June) and International Mountain Day (11 December).