Would-Be Coders Are Studying India’s Glaciers to Learn About Climate Change

The Himalayas include the world’s tallest mountains, constitute its third-largest storehouse of ice, and are the source of rivers that sustain about 800 million people from China to Pakistan. The range is also among the least observed icy watersheds on earth, which means no one knows how a warming climate will change river flows, trigger floods, or otherwise devastate the region’s towns and farms. In part, that’s because just a handful of scientists are studying glaciers in India, where graduate researchers tend to flock toward computer science or engineering.

Alagappan Ramanathan, a professor of environmental science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, wants to change that. In September he sent about a dozen students with degrees in computer science, information science, environmental science, remote sensing, and geography—half of whom had never seen snow—on a two-week hike of Chhota Shigri, a glacier 70 miles west of the Tibetan border in northern India. “For 15 days, you see no other people and only rocks and ice,” says Ramanathan, who funded the trip and one last year with grants from the Indian and Swiss governments. Far from their laptops, the students clambered over boulders and braved crevasses on icy snowfields 16,000 feet above sea level, where temperatures can drop to 5F.