Posted for Mico Tatalovic

They went to war over Himalayan territory in 1962, but India and China are now set to work together to save the mountain range’s glaciers, which are crucial to both countries’ water supplies.

“We are talking to the Chinese about monitoring the Himalayan glaciers,” Jairam Ramesh, Indian environment minister has told the Financial Times. But he also warned that India would not allow Chinese scientists “to climb all over India’s glaciers”. Instead Ramesh wants a collaborative research programme.

As they are of strategic military importance, countries have been secretive about information regarding their parts of Himalayas. Pakistan considers all aerial photos from the area to be state secrets and India is wary of sharing any oceanographic and land-survey data with Pakistan.

Such policies have made the state of Himalayan glaciers “a blind spot, a big scientific question mark”, geographer Mats Eriksson, programme manager for water and hazard management at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development based in Kathmandu, told Nature back in 2008.

Eriksson helped organize a three-day international workshop in 2008 bringing together Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan in a collaborative effort to map glacial retreat in the area.

Now the FT reports that Ramesh is visiting China this month to strike a deal with Beijing ahead of the Copenhagen talks on climate change in December. However the paper also reports that India is skeptical about scientific claims that climate change is melting the region’s glaciers.

Image: “Glacier trails in the Ladokh and Zaskar Ranges (32.0N, 77.5E) of the Great Himalayan Mountain Range on the border of India and China” / NASA