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War and glaciers: the world’s highest battlefields

I have a sort of avuncular interest in Abramov Glacier, high in the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. I once published a paper that relied on a set of detailed measurements from Abramov to learn more about the error bars on mass-balance measurements in general. It is just as well that I published the paper in 1999, because later in that year the research station that supported the field workers who made the measurements was destroyed by militants in a civil war (or it might have been an overspill from a civil war in neighbouring Tajikistan).

That was the end of the long, valuable series of glaciological measurements on Abramov Glacier. I hope the Kirghiz people, or the Tajiks, ended up better off for their civil war, but it certainly wasn’t a good thing for glaciological understanding.

Nor was it the only occasion on which glaciers have got caught up in the machinery of human conflict. One of the oldest conflicts of which we know was the one in which Ötzi, the Iceman of the Ötztal valley in the Alps, died in about 3,300 BC. We know little of the argument which ended with Ötzi suffering an arrow wound that was to prove fatal, but in this instance we have the glacier – the Niederjochferner, to be precise – to thank for preserving the fragmentary and poignant evidence, and for allowing us to communicate with Ötzi. Although it is a shame that we cannot speak to him, he has certainly taught us a lot.

Beside the pathos of Ötzi’s final hours, and the stupidity of what was done on Abramov Glacier, there is a certain grandeur about the highest battlefield of all, Siachen Glacier in Kashmir. In 1949, the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan, which both claimed Kashmir, was laid down only as far north as a point about 50 km from the border of Kashmir with China. In 1984, India occupied most of a triangular void between this point and the Chinese border, containing Siachen and its drainage basin. That quarrel was put on ice, literally, with a new de-facto ceasefire line, across which thousands of Indian soldiers on Siachen now stare at thousands of Pakistani soldiers on neighbouring glaciers.

Every few years, one side gets nervous and shoots at the other, and things threaten to get out of hand. In all, several thousand have died, but many more have died from avalanches, hypothermia and the like than from human violence. Fortunately the violent episodes have been growing less frequent, but 25 years seems like an awfully long time for two armies to stare at each other across a bleak snowfield.

Of course, you might be able to think of a word other than “grandeur” to describe this high-level conflict. If so, I probably wouldn’t argue. I don’t want to offend either of the parties to a 60-year-old quarrel, but I would like to point out that Siachen Glacier is a rather grandiose object – there aren’t many valley glaciers as large as 987 km² – and would be more valuable to us all if we could study it in safety.

There have, in fact, been a few studies of Siachen Glacier. For example M R Bhutiyani, writing in the Journal of Glaciology for 1999 (volume 45, pages 112–118), estimated its mass balance during 1986 to 1991 by the admittedly less than ideal “hydrological” method. Over the five years it lost the equivalent of 2.5 metres depth of water, with unknown but large uncertainty.

Two telling points about Bhutiyani’s work, however, are that he is at the College of Military Engineering in Pune, and that he required clearance for publication from the Directorate of Military Intelligence in New Delhi.

One idea for the triangular void where India, Pakistan and China meet is to turn it into the Siachen Peace Park. It is an idea that has been around for a while. As yet it does not seem to have gained much traction, but it is the best idea I have seen so far. Maybe one day I will be able to write an article headed “Peace and glaciers”.

Posted by Graham Cogley on November 30, 2009 3:00 PM | Permalink