Remi Chauveau Notes
Kolahoi Glacier’s rapid retreat is reshaping Kashmir by carving new rivers, revealing ancient landscapes, and creating an entirely new ecosystem in the wake of its melting.
Science 🧬

Kolahoi: A Retreating Kashmir Glacier Is Creating an Entire New World in Its Wake

5 January 2026
@ajplus Northern Pakistan's glaciers are melting as the climate crisis raises temperatures. #Pakistan #ClimateChange #Glaciers #Skardu #Hunza #GilgitBaltistan #Mountains #Karakoram #Himalayas #HinduKush #ClimateCrisis ♬ Guitar ambient for time-lapse videos, etc.(1008503) - harryfaoki

Whispers of Meltwater and Music

Sai Abhyankkar’s Katchi Sera, with its soft pulse of new beginnings and tender connection, becomes an unexpected echo to the story of the retreating Kolahoi Glacier — both capturing the fragile moment when something ends and something else quietly begins. As Kolahoi melts and reshapes the Kashmiri landscape, it creates an emerging world of rivers, valleys, and life, mirroring the song’s gentle celebration of first feelings and unfolding possibilities. The music’s warm, intimate energy becomes a human‑sized metaphor for the glacier’s transformation: a reminder that even in retreat, nature — like love — can carve out fresh paths, new rhythms, and surprising futures.

🎶 🌄🧊➡️🌊🌱 🔍🏔️ 🌡️🌍 ✨ 🇮🇳🪷🕉️🐘 🔊 Katchi Sera - SaiAbhyankkar‬ Samyuktha and Ken Royson



The Kolahoi Glacier, long considered the “crown” of Kashmir’s mountains, is shrinking faster than scientists once feared.

Yet in its retreat, it is quietly sculpting an entirely new world — a landscape of rivers, valleys, and fragile beginnings emerging from beneath centuries of ice.

🧭 A Glacier in Slow Disappearance

Kolahoi has been melting at an alarming pace, thinning and pulling back from the cliffs that once held it in place. What remains is a fractured body of ice, vulnerable to heat, rainfall, and the shifting climate patterns reshaping the Himalayas.

🌊 New Rivers, New Pathways

As the glacier recedes, meltwater carves fresh channels through the valley, feeding streams that didn’t exist a decade ago. These newborn waterways are altering local geography, creating wetlands and reshaping the routes that shepherds, trekkers, and wildlife have followed for generations.

🌱 Life Rising From the Ice

In the glacier’s wake, pockets of green are appearing — mosses, grasses, and hardy alpine plants taking root in soil untouched by sunlight for centuries. This slow bloom of life hints at an ecosystem in transition, fragile yet determined, adapting to a world without the glacier that once defined it.

🏔 Communities Living With Change

Villagers downstream are already feeling the effects of Kolahoi’s transformation, from unpredictable water flow to shifting grazing patterns. For many, the glacier’s retreat is both a warning and a reminder of their deep dependence on the mountains that surround them.

🔭 A Future Written in Meltwater

Scientists say the new landscapes forming around Kolahoi offer a rare glimpse into how the Himalayas may evolve in the decades ahead. What emerges is a story not just of loss, but of renewal — a reminder that even as the ice withdraws, the land continues to reinvent itself.

#KolahoiGlacier 🏔️ #ClimateChange 🌡️ #KashmirLandscape 🌄 #MeltingIce 🌊 #NewWorldEmerging 🌱

Kolahoi Glacier’s Old Memory

🌫️ The Glacier That Remembers Its Own Past
One of the most overlooked truths about Kolahoi is that as it retreats, it is exposing ancient layers of pollen, soil, and trapped air that haven’t touched the open world for thousands of years. These microscopic traces act like a time capsule, quietly recording what Kashmir’s climate, vegetation, and atmosphere once looked like long before human settlement. Scientists studying these layers say Kolahoi isn’t just melting — it’s releasing the memory of an older Kashmir, offering clues about past monsoons, vanished forests, and long‑forgotten ecological rhythms.

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