Snow is no longer the reliable lifeline it once was for Central Asia’s mighty glaciers. A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) reveals that even the Pamirs, long considered among the planet’s most resilient “water towers," are starting to falter.
By monitoring the Kyzylsu Glacier in Tajikistan, researchers reconstructed glacier health from 1999 to 2023 and found a troubling shift. Glacier stability broke around 2018, when snowfall dropped sharply and melting sped up. With decades of missing data since the Soviet collapse, this study offers rare insights into the Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, where glaciers had until recently defied climate change.
These findings mark a turning point for one of the world’s last climate holdouts. Click through the gallery to see how two decades of data reveal the mighty glaciers’ decline.