Weeping Giants
The Stunning Glaciers of the Southeastern Tibetan Plateau Are a Climate Change Time Bomb. Seeing One Up Close Was Humbling
A laminated QR code dangles on a lanyard centimeters from my face.
“扫一下sǎoyīxià,” says the passenger in front of me with a hint of impatience. “Scan it.” I grab it, open WeChat on my phone and oblige him, completing my fourth Covid protocol location update of the morning.
It’s 06:50 AM and I’m in 海螺沟 Hǎiluógōu, ‘Sea Conch Valley,’ an ancient trading outpost between the Tibetan and Han Chinese kingdoms in Southwest Sichuan. While strict Covid rules have made me wonder whether I’d ever make it, I’m finally on board the packed ‘tourism eco bus’ and ready to enter the National Park, where I hope to lay eyes on a natural wonder uniquely threatened by climate change.
We set off along a winding mountain road, ascending from the ‘subalpine deciduous zone’ into a landscape dominated by vast, mossy pines. Qiāng Herders once referred to this valley as ‘treasured place,’ and it’s easy to see why. Famous for its rocks covered in red algae, the lush mountain corridor is a haven for 30 endangered species, including snow leopards, red pandas, Tibetan macaques, black necked cranes and zibets.
However, I quickly realise that this isn’t some uninhabited wilderness. The sun-dappled forest is dotted with both Tibetan Stupas and red CCP propaganda posters – the latter’s slogans excluding private vehicles and extolling the virtues of ‘Ecological Civilisation.’ With my forehead against the glass, I’m reminded of Pal Nyiri’s description of Chinese tourism as indoctritainment: a form of “patriotic education … in which the state has the ultimate authority to determine the meaning of the landscape.” (Nyiri, 2006)
I get off the bus into noticeably colder air, and am propelled by the crowd into a ticket booth, through a labyrinthine system of pedestrian barriers and onto a cable car. It rocks wildly as we glide over the treetops, the three old folks who accompany me on board all standing up to take photos of the rapidly changing view. When the carriage rattles under the metal runnels, one woman falls directly into my lap, making everyone laugh.
Their excitement is justified. Hundreds of feet below, the vast, lunar terrain looks at first glance like a dry riverbed but is actually a ‘glacier tongue’ covered in rubble created by landslides. Traversing this geological conveyer belt of ice and stone, it’s awe-inspiring to know it carved out this valley in a process that took millions of years.
A Tibetan mantra plays from a nearby speaker, and I’m reminded of ‘Hǎiluógōu Bonfire Night,’ a poem by contemporary writer Shi Wangxiang that exemplifies the romanticism some Han Chinese express towards this kind of topography:
Hundreds of millions of years of ice
Precipitate the desire for youth
The red bonfire ignites my love
Passionate Tibetan girl
Her every smile makes me sad
Tibetan girl who can sing and dance
Her every pose is heart-wrenching…
Despite the stunning views, the knowledge of what climate change is doing to this ecosystem gnaws at my mind. Glacier loss is occurring at alarming rates across the arid Tibetan plateau, yet down here on its wetter Southeast side, buffeted by the Indian and Bengal monsoonal climates, things are moving even faster. The ‘supraalpine debris’ that gives southeastern glaciers their distinctive appearance accelerates melting, by both trapping in heat and breaking up ice through abrasion. (Yang et al, 2015)
Distant, capillary-like streams, streaks from fresh mudslides and fang-like seracs crisscross the glacier. With my layman’s eye, I’m unable to differentiate between marks made by the ancient, self regulating rhythms of the mountain and more recent symptoms of global heating. However, I do know that this glacier has retreated by over 2km since the early 20th century: part of a wider trend of human-caused glacial degradation that is making the paraglacial landscapes of the Tibetan Plateau unpredictable and dangerous for locals. (Zhong et al, 2021).
The car drops us on a viewing platform above the tree line, directly opposite the thousand-meter ‘ice fall’ from which the glacier originates. All around me are the witch’s hat peaks of Daxue Shan – the ‘Big Snowy Mountain Range’ – last of the true giants east of the Himalayas. The name ‘Sea Conch Valley’ comes from the ice fall’s twisted appearance – a resemblance I don’t see myself – but in the midst of this pantheon of titans I understand the human need to ascribe manageable images to the vastness of nature.
Tourists are lining up against the railing to have their photo taken in front of Gongga Mountain, which towers above and behind the ice fall. At seven and a half thousand meters it’s the range’s tallest peak, known to Tibetans as Minya Konka, ‘King of Sichuan.’ Until the 1930s, Western explorers believed it to be taller than Everest, and when British author Robert McFarlane laid eyes on it he wrote that
Konka resembles a child’s sketch of a mountain… a Platonic vision of high country, a dream of what a peak should look like. (McFarlane, 2008)
But I’ll have to take his word for it, as the notoriously shy mountaintop is wreathed in mist. According to local legend, Youyoutsouma, the doe-riding goddess born of an emerald who guards the peak, is covetous of her prized jewel. When a greedy hunter shot her beloved steed, she threw its milk into the sky, flooding the valley and veiling Konka in clouds. (Annapurna, 2022) Now, it only reveals itself to the purest of souls, and it seems like I haven’t made the grade today.
With such fervent reverence in mind, my heart sinks when I notice a black blemish, like a beauty spot, on the ice fall’s upper-left white face. This, I’ve read, is one of several ‘glacier holes’ reported to have opened since the 1990s. (Li et al, 2008)
I feel a sudden, strong need to find someone who reveres this mountain, and hear what it means to watch their god melting before their eyes. But after walking past a couple Stupas, my impromptu search ends when I blunder into a small museum exhibit. A static ‘family’ of mannequins in Tibetan attire are arranged in a mock pastoral scene around a taxidermized yak, the yellowing jawbone of which protrudes through its stitches. Looking into the frozen expressions of the mannequins, I can’t help but think of the role taxidermy played in the conquest and looting of foreign lands in my own nation’s history.
Looking to escape the crowd, I follow a half hidden path away from the designated tourist area to a boulder field. The cloud-wrapped treetops seem to grow up through the ground, reminding me how easy it would be to make an irreversible misstep. It’s peaceful here amid the sphagnum and orange day lily, but the vast panorama gives me a feeling of emptiness.It occurs to me then that containing and profiting from the exploitation of isolated pockets of ‘pristine’ nature is a futile endeavour, pursued by cultures already divorced from the natural world.
But the thought is interrupted by a distant boom, followed by a scraping sound like the tide receding over a pebble beach. Scrambling onto a boulder, I see a new streak of white down on the supraalpine debris, like bird shit on a tin roof. The sound was caused by what must have been a massive shelf of ice calving off the ice fall, followed by an avalanche.
Gliding effortlessly down the mountain in the cable car, it’s clear to me now that the age of convenient separation from the barriers of nature is over. Whether it’s the Covid19 pandemic or the most intense heatwave ever recorded that recently hit China, the planetary boundaries we’ve ignored for so long are hitting back. Time is running out, but it’s still up to us how dignified or desperate this new age of realignment will be. And with hope of real breakthroughs taking place at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 100 days from now, we have no choice but to throw our hearts and minds into realising a society that thrives alongside nature.
But the greatest injustice, I conclude as I hop off the cable car at the tip of the glacier tongue, is that it is those who still live in proximity to nature who will be the most impacted. Those who’ve already suffered greatly at the hands of industrialised, expansionist societies – and who may in fact hold some of the answers to navigating this nightmare – are the first to feel its wrath.
Sources:
Annapurna, Kris (2022) Great Tales in Mountaineering History: Minya Konka, 1982, Explorersweb.com
Ashby, J & Machin, R (2021) Legacies of Colonial Violence in Natural History Collections, Journal of Natural Science Collections, Vol 8
Li, Z et al (2008) Changes of the Hailuogou glacier, Mt. Gongga, China, against the background of climate change during the Holocene, Elsevier
McFarlane, R (2008) Into the Wild, The Guardian
Nyiri, P (2006) Scenic Spots: Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority, University of Washington Press
Yang, J et al (2015) Vulnerability of Mountain Glaciers in China to Climate Change, Ke Ai Publishing
Yan, Z et al (2021) Intensified Paraglacial Slope Failures Due to Accelerating Downwasting of a Temperate Glacier in Mt. Gongga, Southeastern Tibet Plateau, Earth Surface Dynamics
Yong, Z et al (2010) Multi-Decadal Ice-Velocity and Elevation Changes of a Monsoonal Maritime Glacier: Hailuogou glacier, China, Journal of Glaciology
If you’d like to see how I cycled to the town of Hǎiluógōu before entering the national park, stay tuned for our next video, in which I’ll take you on the adventure with me. It features me camping in a Tibetan kebab tent, moving interactions with locals and stunning drone shots. Subscribe for free now so you don’t miss it!
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Beautiful description of stunning landscapes. Chilling to know that climate change affects even the remotest parts of the world… Keep us posted on what sounds like and amazing journey!