An anomalously slight glacier mass gain during 2000 to the 2010s has recently been reported in the Karakoram region. However, to date, no investigations of the region-wide glacier mass balance in the Karakoram prior to 2000 have been reported, leaving a knowledge gap for assessing glacier responses to climate change. We calculated elevation and mass change using DEMs generated from KH-9 images ...

Assessments of the state of health of Hindu-Kush–Karakoram– Himalaya glaciers and their contribution to regional hydrology and global sea-level rise suffer from a severe lack of observations1. The globally averaged mass balance of glaciers and ice caps is negative1–3. An anomalous gain of mass has been suggested for the Karakoram glaciers2,4–6, but was not confirmed by recent estimates of mass ...

A summary of the distribution of green toads containing most of the data published after the discovery of polyploid forms (1976) including a map, an index and a bibliography are presented and discussed. 21 Asian type localities of hitherto described nominal green toad taxa are shown. The tetraploids are distributed in high mountains and extremely continental regions with strong climatic shifts....

Based on the MODIS10A2 snow product data from 2001 to 2019, characteristics of annual variation, interannual variation and spatial distribution cover in China Pakistan Economic Corridor 2019 are analyzed by using remote sensing technology. The result shows that: snow-cover a year generally starts middle October, area reaches maximum value January next year, minimum July. From China-Pakistan sho...

Although bacterial assemblages are important components of soils in arid ecosystems, the knowledge about composition, life-strategies, and environmental drivers is still fragmentary, especially in remote high-elevation mountains. We compared the quality and quantity of heterotrophic bacterial assemblages between the rhizosphere of the dominant cushion-forming plant Thylacospermum ceaspitosum an...

Millions of people rely on river water originating from snow- and ice-melt basins in the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalayas (HKH). One such basin is Upper Indus Basin (UIB), where contribution can be more than 80%. Being origin some world’s largest alpine glaciers, this could highly susceptible to global warming climate change. Field observations geodetic measurements suggest that Karakoram Mountain...