One of the world’s last remaining stable glacial zones may finally be succumbing to global warming: researchers have documented an unprecedented ice loss in Asia’s Pamir Mountains. The findings have been published in Advances in Climate Change Research.
For decades, glaciers worldwide have been retreating due to rising temperatures, but the region in Central Asia, nicknamed the “Roof of the World,” has defied this trend. From the 1970s through the early 21st century, glaciers in the western Kunlun Mountains, the Karakoram Mountains, and the eastern Pamir Mountains remained stable or even grew slightly.
Fan Yu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues monitored the 3-kilometer-long Kangxiwa Glacier in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This glacier is situated in the eastern Pamir Mountains, reaching an elevation of 5,350 meters above sea level at its highest point.
Up until 2022, the ice mass on the Kangxiwa Glacier showed some fluctuations but maintained a pattern of moderate, stable ice loss, with occasional years experiencing minor growth.
However, ice loss has since accelerated. In 2025, the team recorded a record-breaking ice loss, equivalent to a 1.5-meter reduction in water from the entire glacier surface. This figure is over four times the average rate observed for the glacier between 2011 and 2024.
The record melt observed at Kangxiwa, mirrored by other glaciers in the Pamir Mountains, was driven by exceptionally high temperatures. Unlike previous years where extreme temperatures were confined to a single month, the elevated temperatures in 2025 persisted throughout the entire melt season.
The study’s findings suggest that glaciers in the Pamir-Karakoram region are no longer an exception to the global trend, and extreme events are likely to further hasten glacial melt in this area, according to the researchers.
Sean Ives of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand notes that the results align with predictions that human-induced climate change will increase the likelihood of extremely high temperatures that can cause glacial melt. However, he cautions that it is too early to conclude that such melting is guaranteed.
Mass balance measurements for the Kangxiwa Glacier have only been collected since 2011, making it difficult to definitively label 2025 as an extreme year in a historical context, he explains.
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