The Tibetan plateau and the bordering mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Karakoram, the Pamir and the Qilian make up a vast region known as the Third Pole, home to 100,000 square kilometres of glaciers that supply water to about 1.4 billion people in Asia.
The status of the glaciers has been a point of contention. Earlier this year, an analysis of 7 years' worth of measurements taken by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission suggested2 that high-altitude Asian glaciers on the whole are losing ice only one-tenth as fast as previously estimated, and that glaciers on the Tibetan plateau are actually growing.