“As a researcher, I studied where the glacier used to be in 1981,” said Sharad Prasad Joshi, gazing out over what was once a brilliant sweep of white. “Now, instead of a white glacier, it’s just rocky, with debris.”

He added, “It feels like a dream, to see how drastically it’s changed in 50 years.”

Joshi, a cryosphere analyst at ICIMOD and Nepal’s national correspondent for the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), was one of the 50 people who trekked to the remote Yala Glacier in Langtang National Park to mark its vanishing on Monday.

According to the organisers, the event, a high-altitude tribute, brought together Buddhist monks, glaciologists from four countries (Bhutan, China, India and Nepal), and members of the Langtang community.

With prayers, speeches, and unveiling of the two granite memorial plaques, the event served as a public reckoning with climate change’s pace and its cost.

Yala, which has shrunk by 66 percent and retreated 784m since it was first measured in the 1970s, is projected to be among the first Nepali glaciers to join the growing numbers of glaciers declared ‘dead’ worldwide.

The plaques at the Yala Glacier base camp carry a message for future generations as part of global awareness-raising efforts for the United Nations’ IYGP (International Year for Glaciers’ Preservation) 2025.

The plaques have messages inscribed by celebrated authors Manjushree Thapa and Andri Snær Magnason of Iceland, in English, Nepali, and local Tibetan dialect. It also notes the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 426 parts per million, as a measure of what drove Yala’s decline.

Thapa’s inscription reads, “Yala, where the gods dream high in the mountains, where the cold is divine… Dream of a glacier and the civilisations downstream. Entire ecosystems: our own sustenance.”

Magnason adds a blunt message to the future, “We know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

Yala is now the third glacier in the world, and the first in Asia, to carry Magnason’s words.

“Locally, the pasture is now so dry the yak herders can’t graze here anymore,” said Joshi. This was the 26th time that he went there. “Personally and professionally, it feels incredibly important to make the losses we’re seeing visible,” he said. “It feels like no one’s paying sufficient attention to this issue, and it is so consequential.”

The tribute comes just days ahead of the Sagarmatha Sambaad, Nepal’s high-level international dialogue on climate and environment.

Yala stands out not only for how quickly it is disappearing, but also for its critical role in cryosphere research. It is one of only seven glaciers in the 3,500-kilometre Hindu Kush Himalaya range monitored annually for over a decade. This makes it one of the region’s most-studied rivers of ice.

“Yala’s accelerating disappearance is totemic of the disastrous deglaciation we’re now seeing unfold across Earth’s mountains at a pace that far outstrips scientists’ worst-case scenarios,” said Pema Gyamtsho, director general of ICIMOD.

He warned that the loss of glaciers threatens water security, energy production, agriculture, and political stability in a region home to over a billion people.

The tribute is also a rallying point for ICIMOD’s ‘SaveOurSnow’ campaign. Both Thapa and Magnason have agreed to donate their author fees to local climate action.

Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary and special envoy for and chief negotiator on climate change for India, highlighted the necessity for collective action against the climate crisis.

“The issues that divide us today will be dwarfed by the disasters we’ll face,” said Saran, who is attending Sagarmatha Sambaad in Kathmandu this week, “if we don’t recognise our interconnectedness with the ecological systems that support us, and act together.”