The vegetation line in places like Nepal and Bhutan is shifting upward by meters per year, with implications for how water moves through the planet’s “Third Pole.”
mountains
Posted inNews
Tree Lines Are Migrating. Some Up, Some Down.
Between 2000 and 2020, 42% of tree lines around the world crept upward, largely because of climate change. But 25% moved downhill, seemingly because of factors such as land use changes and wildfires.
Posted inThe Landslide Blog
Wealth and land-cover change govern landslide fatalities on world’s mountains
A new paper Fidan et al. (2026) demonstrates that wealth and the rate of land-cover change play a key role in determining the occurrence of fatal landslides in mountain areas. These factors are statistically more significant that precipitation and topography. A fascinating new paper (Fidan et al. 2026 – this paper is both open access […]
Posted inNews
Los glaciares se están calentando más lentamente de lo esperado, pero no por mucho tiempo
Un conjunto de datos sin precedentes ofrece información sobre el efecto de enfriamiento contraintuitivo de los glaciares a escala global.
Posted inFeatures
Satellite Radar Advances Could Transform Global Snow Monitoring
The recent SnowEx campaign and the new NISAR satellite mission are lighting the way to high-resolution snowpack monitoring and improved decisionmaking in critical river basins around the world.
Posted inNews
Glaciers Are Warming More Slowly Than Expected, but Not for Long
An unprecedented dataset offers insight into the counterintuitive cooling effect of glaciers on a global scale.
Posted inNews
Safety Device Supplies Life-Saving Air in an Avalanche
An Alpine medical team buried 24 volunteers in a mountain pass. Their study confirmed the efficacy of the Safeback SBX, which uses snow’s natural porosity to supply air to buried avalanche victims.
Posted inNews
Years-Old Groundwater Dominates Spring Mountain Streams
Alpine rain and snow take much longer to percolate into western U.S. streams than previously thought, adding complexity to long-standing hydrologic models.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
High Relief, Low Relief — Glaciers Do It All
Contrary to conventional wisdom that glaciers just carve landscapes, they can also form low-relief surfaces by sheltering rock from erosion, enriching understanding of how mountain landscapes evolve.
Posted inOpinions
Beyond Majesty and Myths: Facing the Realities of Mountainside Development
Expansive construction in fragile mountain environments is often pursued without adequate consideration of heightened hazards and local concerns, putting people and infrastructure at greater risk.