This article was supported by Rolex, which is partnering with the National Geographic Society to shine a light on the challenges facing the Earth’s critical life-support systems through science, exploration, and storytelling.
High in the Himalaya, near the base of the Gangotri glacier, water burbles along a narrow river. Pebbles, carried in the small river’s flow, pling as they carom downstream.
This water will flow thousands of miles, eventually feeding people, farms, and the natural world on the vast, dry Indus plain. Many of the more than 200 million people in the downstream basin rely on water that comes from this stream and others like it.
But climate change is hitting those high mountain regions more brutally than the world on average. That change is putting the “water towers” like this one, and the billions of people that depend on them, in ever more precarious positions. New research published Monday in Nature
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