GANGOTRI, India (Reuters) - Hindus from all over India flock to the holy Ganges every day to immerse themselves in the sacred river and wash away their sins. But geologists say that in a few thousand years, devotees may not be able to undertake the ritual, which is believed to speed the way to the attainment of nirvana, or salvation, from the cycle of births and deaths through reincarnation.
They say the Gangotri glacier, the source of India‘s holiest of holy rivers, is melting and receding at a pace that could dry up the Ganges in a matter of millennia. „The first formal study by the Geological Survey of India was done in 1935, and the more recent one in 1990,“ said Deepak Srivastava, director of GSI‘s Glaciology division. „There is no denying that this glacier has been receding at a rate of 10-30 metres per year over this half a century.“ One of the largest glaciers in the Himalayas, the Gangotri is about 7,100 metres above sea-level. The glacier‘s estimated volume in 1990 was about 28.75 cubic km. Geologists say the glacier was receding by around 2,530 square metres a year in 1935. That pace went up by two and a half times during the 1956-62 period and five times during the 1962-71 period. The recession process slowed down between 1971 and 1977, only to revert to its earlier pace thereafter. But geologists are scratching their heads, puzzling over why the glacier has started to melt at a faster rate. The retreat began before global warming, due to industrialisation, was ever heard of. Ravi Kumar, another senior scientist at the GSI regional headquarters in Lucknow, attributed the recession of the Gangotri glacier to increasing human activity and indiscriminate deforestation in and around the region. But some scientists put the phenomenon down to nothing more sinister than the earth‘s evolution. Early scriptures and subsequent scientific documents have recorded conflicting sources of the river. In the first scientific study on the Gangotri glacier, carried out in 1842 by two British scientists, the source of the Ganges was pinpointed two km downstream from where Gaumukh is today. The Ganges river, called Ganga in India, does not take its popular name until lower in the Himalayas. From Gangotri to the downhill town of Deoprayag, it is called the Bhagirathi. At Deoprayag, it joins with the Alaknanda river and from there on is called the Ganges.
