Life Beneath the Melting Glaciers

B ulbul Kaie remembers when summer in Hassanabad revolved around a stream. The village lies in the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, a disputed territory in northern Pakistan bordering China, Afghanistan, and Indian-administered Kashmir. Kaie’s family would carry chairs down to the stream fed by meltwater from the glaciers above, where a cold breeze rose from the water. They would spend afternoons on its bank among orchards heavy with apricots and cherries.

“We would sit together, drink tea, and enjoy the sound of the stream until it got dark,” recounts the mother of four. “We used to look forward to summer. The sound of the water made us feel calm.” Now summer brings dread. “We fear what will happen each year,” the fifty-year-old says. Pakistan has more than thirteen thousand glaciers, one of the largest concentrations outside the polar regions, many of them in Gilgit-Baltistan. As climate change drives temperatures higher in these mountains, where warming is outpacing the global average, the ice melts faster and rain falls harder and less predictably.

Cloudbursts — intense, localized downpours that experts say were virtually unknown here until recently — can now destroy a village in an afternoon. Last year, Hassanabad was among dozens of villages across Gilgit-Baltistan hit by one of the region’s deadliest flood seasons in years. At least seventy-two people died , and more than a thousand homes were destroyed or damaged. The floods destroyed half of Kaie’s home. She has yet to rebuild.

“I’m only staying here because I have no resources to go elsewhere,” she says, her voice breaking. “I fear for my children’s lives and mental health.” Bulbul Kaie sits with her twelve-year-old son inside their damaged home in Hassanabad, and a crack runs down the wall behind them. (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin ) Kaie is one of thousands still trying to recover. Some live in tents or cracked houses they fear could collapse. Others have been moved onto bare government plots with no land to farm and no way to earn.

Few can afford to start again, and the next disaster is rarely more than a season away. The people living among these glaciers bear almost no responsibility for the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming; Pakistan itself accounts for about 1 percent of global emissions. Yet it is among the countries most affected by extreme weather, and in its remote mountain communities, homes are being washed away, farmland is disappearing, and livelihoods are collapsing.

At the Glaciers’ Mercy B ehram Shah gathers cherries from a tree outside his Hassanabad home and carries them to the table in a woven basket. “We rely on the glaciers for everything,” says the seventy-six-year-old, who has lost about nine acres to floods in the past decade. “Our livelihoods, and even our drinking water, depend on them. We are completely at the mercy of these glaciers.” Every spring, before the summer melt, villagers would gather at the watercourses to pray over the year’s flow, asking God for protection and enough water for the months ahead, Shah recounts.

These days, few still make the journey. “We used to see the glaciers as the source of our lives,” Shah says. “Now, because of the floods, we associate them with destruction.” Behram Shah at his home in Hassanabad. He lost about nine acres of land to floods in the past decade and says villagers are “completely at the mercy of these glaciers.” (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin ) “The cycles that kept us in balance for centuries are being disrupted,” he adds.

“All we can do now is pray and leave everything to God.” Hassanabad sits in the Hunza Valley, in the Karakoram — one of four mountain ranges that meet in Gilgit-Baltistan and contain some of the world’s highest peaks. Its roughly 175 households are scattered across the mountainous terrain, clustered on either side of the stream and up the slopes. Most residents are Ismaili Muslims who farm fields and orchards passed down through generations.

Three miles above the village, the Shisper and Muchuhar glaciers, once branches of a single glacier, eventually drain into the same stream, which runs about four miles down the valley to join the Hunza River. Their meltwater feeds the irrigation channels that keep Hassanabad alive. In 2018, the Shisper began to surge , exhibiting behavior of a type of glacier that can sit almost motionless for decades or centuries before suddenly lurching forward.

It advanced nearly a mile, at one point moving nearly sixty feet a day, before pushing across the ravine and damming the stream draining the Muchuhar. The lake that formed behind the ice burst four times in four years, sending floodwater down the valley that scoured the ground along the stream’s banks. The last, in 2022, swept away the Karakoram Highway Bridge, cutting Hunza off from the rest of the country for two weeks. By last summer, the danger was supposed to have passed.

The ice still lay across the ravine, says Sher Muhammad, a cryosphere scientist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, but a wide tunnel had opened through it and water was flowing freely. Then the heat came. One town in southern Gilgit-Baltistan hit 119 degrees Fahrenheit (48.3 degrees Celsius), its highest temperature in nearly three decades. Across the region, streams were already running high as unusually warm conditions accelerated snow and glacier melt.

Chunks of ice broke off and fell into the stream, blocking the flow, Muhammad says. Water accumulated behind the ice blockages until they failed, releasing the impound water downstream. It happened twice, in July and August, damaging houses and farmland, ripping out a section of the Karakoram Highway, and cutting the water supply to Aliabad, Hunza’s main commercial town, and nearby villages. Over the years, dozens of homes in Hassanabad have been destroyed or dismantled before the floods could reach them.

The Floodwater Threat W hat came before the floods, Kaie says, was not a roar. It was a silence. “It’s very ominous,” she says, sitting on the floor of her home, cracks running down the walls. “The entire flow of water suddenly feels like it stops. And there’s silence for about half an hour.” In those minutes, the family would run to the bank to see what was coming. If the water looked dangerous, Kaie would send the children uphill to a relative’s house and go back for whatever she could carry.

“When the floodwater comes, it is so strong,” she says. “It carries boulders the size of houses. If it reaches your home, it will pull it from its foundations.” They have lived this way for years, fleeing when the water rises, returning when it drops. When I visited in August, the family had already fled several times that summer. Their fridge and other belongings were still at a relative’s house up the hill. Last year’s floods were the worst this part of Hassanabad had seen, residents say.

They tore through the orchards between Kaie’s house and the stream and destroyed half the home she and her husband had spent seven years building. The couple had sold most of their farmland to afford it. The flood pathway in Hassanabad, with the stripped shells of dismantled homes along the edge of the canyon that floods have carved into the land. (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin ) She scrolls through her phone to a photograph from before: rows of fruit trees running down to the water.

“It was a very beautiful home,” she says, holding up the screen. Outside, the same ground is dry and stripped bare. Later, the highway was rebuilt. It had always run a couple of hundred feet below the houses until last summer’s flood swept away part of it. The rebuilt section was laid higher up the slope, directly in front of Kaie’s house. Now cargo trucks hauling goods between Pakistan and China pass a few feet from her door. They shake the walls, rattle the windows, and widen the cracks.

Dust hangs in the air. What came before the floods was not a roar. It was a silence. Her twelve-year-old son sometimes wakes at night, hears the trucks, and thinks the flood has come back, she says. He runs outside, and the family has to find him in the dark. “This constant uncertainty is causing a lot of psychological issues for my children,” Kaie tells me, her son sitting quietly beside her. “I try to calm them down and assure them they are safe, but they are still terrified of every sound.”

She wants to leave, but her husband drives someone else’s car for a living and does not earn enough to move elsewhere. And no one will buy a house in a village beset by recurrent floods. “If someone came and gave us money, we would leave immediately,” Kaie says, sniffling back tears. “It feels like torture knowing any day the waters will return and destroy our home we worked so hard to build. And it’s not a question of whether it will happen again; it’s guaranteed.”

Other families have stopped waiting for the water. Each summer, they take their houses apart, carrying off beams, windows, and doors before the floods can claim them. Around the stream, the floods have carved a deep canyon into the land, with another Hassanabad neighborhood sitting beside it. On a flattened patch scattered with debris, the remains of the area’s jamatkhana , the Ismaili house of worship and community gathering, lie among the stripped shells of dismantled homes.

Living on the Edge S ultan Ali, seventy-five, an elder and community leader, walks me along the cliff, shouting whenever I get too close to the edge. “The ground is not strong here,” he warns. “It can collapse at any moment.” He gestures at the canyon below. “You see all of this? This was the most beautiful part of our village,” he says, shaking his head. Nearby, Dilshad Bano, fifty-three, has come to pick cherries on a plot she abandoned about seven years ago.

Floods destroyed half her house in 2019. The family dismantled the rest. “It took many years and a lot of hard work to build that house; we used up all our savings,” she says, standing in the ruins. “Then all of it was gone in a single day.” Dilshad Bano walks through the ruins of her home in Hassanabad. (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin ) They have moved higher up the valley, to a house twenty-five minutes’ walk through the mountains from the nearest road.

“When we have health problems, it becomes extremely difficult,” she tells me. Bano and her brother-in-law, Muhammad Abbas, fifty-five, each received about $900 in government compensation a few years ago, they say. Abbas’s four-room house is now a strip of orange-painted wall at the edge of the drop. Sultan Ali says the state needs to relocate families from the village, because the floods keep returning, and that residents have mostly relied on each other and on aid from the Aga Khan Development Network rather than the government. (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin ) “That money was a joke,” he says.

“You can’t rebuild your life with that.” He took out a bank loan and built three rooms at the far end of the village on the only plot he could afford. It floods and erodes like everywhere else. Beyond some compensation for affected families, officials have done little for Hassanabad, residents say. The state has evacuated families and sent food and medicine after each flood, and rebuilt the road and the bridge. But no one has been relocated, and residents say most of the assistance they received afterward — temporary shelters, food, and bathrooms — came from the Aga Khan Development Network.

“The government is not helping us,” Ali says. “They need to relocate these families because this is a very dangerous place to live. We’re mostly farmers and shepherds and don’t have the resources to rebuild after losing everything.” There was supposed to be a warning, too. Hassanabad is one of two