Pakistan has more than 7,000 glaciers. Climate change is melting them into floodwater

Benji Jones in Vox:

Much of Pakistan is now underwater.

A series of extreme floods has utterly devastated the South Asian nation, which is home to some 225 million people, washing away roads and buildings, destroying farms, and stranding hundreds of thousands. Over the weekend, which brought another bout of torrential rain, government officials said the death toll had soared past 1,000 and water had inundated as much as a third of the country. The main fuel for these catastrophic floods is rainfall. Summer is monsoon season, and this has been a particularly wet and wicked one, perhaps made worse by climate change. But there’s another culprit behind the recent devastation: melting glaciers and snow.

More here.