High in the mountains ringing Kashmir, glaciers have spent decades in retreat. What they leave behind isn’t empty rock — it’s water. As ice melts back, it pools into glacial lakes, some dammed by nothing sturdier than loose moraine debris. When one of these natural dams gives way — from a rockfall, an earthquake, heavy rain, or simply too much meltwater pressure — the result is a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood, or GLOF: a wall of water and sediment that can tear through a valley with almost no warning.

A comprehensive 2026 survey mapped 155 glacial lakes across the Kashmir Himalaya and found their ice-contact lakes have grown by roughly a quarter since the early 1990s. Five lakes now stand out as carrying “very high” outburst risk: Bramsar, Chirsar, Nundkol, Gangabal, and Bhagsar — all sitting in the Upper Jhelum basin, feeding into the same river system that runs through Srinagar and the Kashmir Valley. Bramsar and Chirsar alone threaten over 400 buildings and five........

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