PADDLER 18
PADDLER 18
MOTIVATION FOR RESEARCH
I ’ m Alex , a PhD Student at the University of Leeds . My research ultimately centres on mountain communities and how they have been and will be impacted as our natural environment responds to a changing climate . Nowhere is changing faster than the Himalaya at the moment , and this is a worry because the glaciers there provide freshwater to almost 20 % of the global population , who use it for irrigation , sanitation , hydropower and drinking . I am focused on understanding how these glaciers will respond to a warming climate so that we can help the people of South Asia to adapt to changes in the water supply that are now an inevitable part of their future .
OUR AIMS
The main aim of this expedition was to set out a network of sensors that would collect information on the physical conditions of a glacial lake in Nepal . The period between May and October is particularly interesting here because it marks the Indian Summer Monsoon , during which the glaciers gain mass from intense snowfall and lose it through intense melt . Primarily , we wanted to capture how the lake changes as it becomes filled with cold and sediment-laden meltwater . To do this , we installed three sets of submersible temperature sensors distributed
throughout the lake , continuously recording water temperature between the lake surface and the lake floor until they are removed in October .
Few observations of this kind exist in the Himalaya , or indeed the world , and those that do are limited to the length of fieldwork expeditions ( days or weeks ). Once we have observations that extend throughout the glacier melt season , we can improve our predictive model to account for the role of the lake . We anticipate that including the lake effects in our predictions will significantly reduce the time this glacier will survive and therefore reduce the remaining time before water availability becomes a problem for the people who have lived here for centuries .
THE SITE
Nestled at the flanks of Manaslu ( 8156 m a . s . l .) in the Annapurna Conservation Area , Dona Lake ( 4050 m a . s . l .) is one of the largest glacial lakes in Nepal , measuring over 2.5 km in length . It originally formed on the surface of Thulagi Glacier but expanded so rapidly between 1990 and 2000 that the glacier ’ s end has now melted away in its entirety , replaced by the lake water we are interested in . The lake is dammed by moraine sediments ( soil and rock that was eroded and deposited by Thulagi Glacier during the previous hundreds of years ).
Anglesey training