Which glacier of Nepal among the following has been declared ‘dead’ in May 2025?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q25 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q25 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer