Midui Glacier
Interesting facts
- Between 1995 and 2014 the tongue of Midui Glacier pulled back by about 300 metres, and the lake at its front grew as the ice withdrew.
- The lowest 1.5 kilometres of the glacier have become stagnant ice, with hollows forming where it collapses into cavities beneath.
- Each of Midui's two icefalls produced ogives, curved alternating bands of light and dark ice; by 2014 the eastern icefall had largely stopped forming them.
- The glacier's last known advance came in 1964, when it pushed up a moraine that still marks its former reach.
- In 2005 China National Geography magazine named Midui among the six most beautiful glaciers in China.
- Each of the two icefalls is reported to be more than 800 metres high and roughly a kilometre wide.
- Glaciers in the surrounding region lost about 13 percent of their area between the 1950s and 2010.
Why it is worth it
Two icefalls pour down from the snowfields of south-eastern Tibet and merge into a single tongue of ice that ends almost among the fields of a farming village. Midui Glacier lies in Bomi County, in the Nyingchi region, close to the Sichuan–Tibet Highway (China National Highway 318), east of the county town of Bomi. Between its two cascades of broken ice stands a strip of dense, untouched forest, and below the snout the valley opens onto the fields and houses of Midui village, so that glacier, woodland and farmland can be taken in from a single spot.
The glacier sits where the Nyenchen Tanglha range meets the Boshula mountains, in the part of Tibet where moist air from the Indian Ocean monsoon reaches far inland. This is the main domain of China's maritime, or monsoonal, glaciers: unlike the dry, cold ice of the high plateau, they are nourished by abundant monsoon snowfall. Midui's tongue descends to only about 2,400 metres above sea level, low enough to reach the edge of cultivated land. Studies of the valley give the glacier a length of roughly 10 kilometres and an area of about 27 square kilometres.
The ice has shaped the valley in more violent ways too. In 1988 a moraine-dammed lake in front of the glacier, known as Guangxieco, burst through its dam after a spell of heavy rain and high temperatures; the flood, peaking at around 1,270 cubic metres per second, turned into a series of debris flows that ran down the Midui valley until they were stopped by the Parlung Tsangpo river. Like most glaciers of the region, Midui has been retreating as the climate warms, and research published in the 2010s confirmed that the monsoonal glaciers of southern Tibet are shrinking, with consequences for rivers that flow on towards India.
Getting there
Midui Glacier is on the G318 Sichuan–Tibet Highway in Bomi County, east of Bomi town. The nearest airport with scheduled flights is Qamdo Bangda Airport (BPX), about 135 km away in a straight line; the city of Qamdo is about 197 km away. Although the Indian town of Tezu is closer as the crow flies, it lies across the international border and the Himalayan ranges, and the practical approach is along the G318 within Tibet.
On these lists
29.45444, 96.50744per Wikidata