Himalayan Rivers Are Wandering Twice as Fast, and Climate Change Is Why

Somewhere above 4,000 metres on the Tibetan Plateau, a river bend that held its position for decades has begun to slip sideways. Not catastrophically, not in any single moment you could photograph. But over forty years of satellite imagery, the movement is unmistakable: channels that once migrated slowly across their floodplains are now doing so at nearly double the pace. The numbers are large enough to be startling. Between 1980 and 2020, the lateral migration rates of unconfined Himalayan...