Glaciers of Nepal: Ngozumpa, Khumbu, Yala and Other Major Glaciers

Nepal's most complete national glacier inventory was prepared by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) from Landsat satellite imagery. It recorded 3,808 glaciers in 2010 AD (2066–67 BS), covering about 3,902 square kilometres — roughly 2.6 percent of Nepal's land area — with estimated ice reserves of around 312 cubic kilometres. Almost all of this ice lies above 4,000 metres, draped across the high Himalaya from Kanchenjunga in the east to Api-Saipal in the far west.

These glaciers are the frozen headwaters of Nepal's three great river systems — the Koshi in the east, the Gandaki in the centre and the Karnali in the west — which in turn feed the Ganges. Their meltwater sustains dry-season flows that irrigation, drinking-water systems and hydropower plants depend on, which is why ICIMOD calls the wider Hindu Kush Himalaya, home to some 54,000 glaciers, the 'water tower of Asia'.

This page is a hub for Nepal's named glaciers — the ice bodies themselves — as distinct from glacial lakes such as Imja Tsho and Tsho Rolpa, which are covered in our lakes pages. Each glacier below is profiled by length, basin, parent peak, retreat behaviour and monitoring status, drawing on ICIMOD, the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) and peer-reviewed studies.

The Ngozumpa Glacier in Solukhumbu district is the longest glacier in Nepal at about 36 kilometres, and is often described as the longest in the entire Himalaya. It flows south from the slopes of Cho Oyu (8,188 m), the world's sixth-highest mountain, and the adjacent Gyachung Kang wall, descending from above 8,000 metres to a terminus at about 4,700 metres in the Dudh Koshi basin. With an area of roughly 79 square kilometres it is also Nepal's largest glacier, and the trekking village of Gokyo and the famous Gokyo lakes sit along its western lateral moraine.

Like most large glaciers on the Nepal side of the Himalaya, Ngozumpa's lower tongue is blanketed in rock debris that can be several metres thick. Ground-penetrating radar surveys in 2016 by a team from the University of Innsbruck, the British Antarctic Survey, Kathmandu University and ICIMOD confirmed that hundreds of metres of ice still lie beneath this rubble.

Rather than retreating rapidly at its snout, Ngozumpa is thinning and wasting in place. Meltwater is pooling into supraglacial ponds that are coalescing near the terminus into the growing Spillway Lake, which glaciologists estimate could eventually reach about 6 km long, 1 km wide and 100 metres deep — a serious potential outburst-flood hazard for Sherpa villages down the Dudh Koshi valley, and a key reason the glacier is closely studied.

The Khumbu Glacier is about 17 kilometres long and is the highest glacier on Earth. Its ice originates in the Western Cwm between Mount Everest and the Nuptse–Lhotse ridge at around 7,600 metres, and its debris-covered tongue ends near Lobuche at about 4,900 metres. The classic Everest Base Camp trek follows its lateral moraine, and Base Camp itself sits on the glacier. Just above, the ice tumbles through the Khumbu Icefall, the unstable frozen cascade that is the first major obstacle on the standard South Col climbing route.

Under the British-led EverDrill project, researchers drilled 27 boreholes into the glacier in 2017 and 2018 and installed temperature sensors up to 192 metres deep. The results, published in Scientific Reports in November 2018, showed the ice is surprisingly 'warm' — the coldest measured only minus 3.3 degrees Celsius, far warmer than the local mean annual air temperature — meaning much of the glacier is close to melting point and highly sensitive to further warming.

Like Ngozumpa, the Khumbu's lower tongue is largely stagnant and loses mass mainly by surface lowering (downwasting) rather than dramatic frontal retreat. Thinning ice and shifting meltwater ponds have prompted discussion among Nepali authorities and expedition operators about eventually relocating Everest Base Camp — a visible sign of how warming is reshaping the world's most famous glacier.

North of Kathmandu, the Langtang Valley in Rasuwa district is sometimes called the 'valley of glaciers'. The Langtang Glacier, about 18 kilometres long and roughly 46.5 square kilometres, is the valley's largest and one of the biggest debris-covered glaciers in Nepal; its meltwater feeds the Langtang Khola and then the Trishuli River in the Gandaki basin. A study in The Cryosphere (Ragettli et al., 2016) comparing elevation models from 1974 to 2015 found thinning across the upper Langtang catchment accelerated from about 0.24 metres per year (1974–2006) to about 0.45 metres per year (2006–2015).

The Lirung Glacier descends from Langtang Lirung (7,234 m), the highest peak of the Langtang Himal, spanning roughly 4,000 to 7,100 metres. Its tongue is buried under thick debris studded with ice cliffs and meltwater ponds that concentrate melt: the debris-covered area lowered by an estimated 1.3 to 1.8 metres per year between 1974 and 2010, and the stagnant lower tongue has effectively detached from its steep ice sources.

The small, clean-ice Yala Glacier (about 1.4 km long, 1.61 sq km, at 5,168–5,661 m) is Nepal's most accessible research glacier and an ICIMOD benchmark site, with annual in-situ mass-balance measurements since 2011 and over 100 researchers trained on its ice. Its decline has been stark: Yala has lost 66 percent of its area and retreated 784 metres since the 1970s, with a mass balance of about −0.80 metres water equivalent per year in 2011/12–2016/17.

On 12 May 2025 (29 Baisakh 2082 BS), scientists, Buddhist monks and local communities held a 'tribute to Yala Glacier' — one of Asia's first glacier funerals — installing granite plaques inscribed with messages by Nepali author Manjushree Thapa and Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason in English, Nepali and Tibetan. Projections suggest Yala could disappear by the 2040s, likely making it among the first Nepali glaciers formally declared dead.

The Rikha Samba Glacier lies in the Hidden Valley of Mustang district, on the arid northern side of the Dhaulagiri range in the Kali Gandaki basin. It is about 5.4 kilometres long with an area of 5.7 square kilometres, spanning 5,416 to 6,515 metres — a high elevation range that partly shelters it from melt. Even so, its terminus retreated about 431 metres between 1989 and 2013 (about 18 metres per year), and its 2011/12–2016/17 mass balance was about −0.39 metres water equivalent per year — negative, but roughly half the loss rate of the lower-lying Yala.

Yala and Rikha Samba are Nepal's two glaciological 'benchmark' glaciers under the Cryosphere Monitoring Programme, established in 2011 by ICIMOD together with the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, Kathmandu University and Tribhuvan University. Field teams return every year to measure stakes and snow pits, maintain weather stations and train young Nepali glaciologists. Such long-term series are rare: across the 3,500-kilometre Hindu Kush Himalayan arc, only about seven glaciers have been monitored annually for a decade or more, and only about 38 have any in-situ measurements.

Other Nepali glaciers with sustained measurement include the Mera Glacier in the Hinku valley and West Changri Nup near Everest, monitored with French research partners; West Changri Nup lost about 1.24 metres water equivalent per year during 2010–2015. These records feed the World Glacier Monitoring Service and underpin Nepal's climate reporting.

The Annapurna South Glacier occupies the floor of the Annapurna Sanctuary in Kaski district, the glacial amphitheatre reached at Annapurna Base Camp (4,130 m). Fed by avalanches off Annapurna South (7,219 m), Annapurna I (8,091 m) and the surrounding wall of peaks, it is the source of the Modi Khola, which drains the sanctuary through a single narrow gorge into the Gandaki system. Trekkers at Base Camp look directly onto its crevassed, debris-strewn surface and freshly exposed moraines — visible evidence of retreat — though unlike Yala or Rikha Samba it has no long-term mass-balance record and remains little studied.

Many other named glaciers stripe Nepal's high valleys: the Barun Glacier under Makalu, the Yalung and Kanchenjunga glaciers in the far east, the Trakarding Glacier in Rolwaling whose retreat created Tsho Rolpa, and the Mera Glacier above the Hinku valley. Most share the same anatomy — an avalanche-fed accumulation zone beneath a great peak and a long, debris-covered tongue that is stagnating and thinning.

The distinction matters: the glacier is the moving ice body, while Imja Tsho, Tsho Rolpa or Ngozumpa's Spillway Lake are glacial lakes formed by its retreat, covered separately in our lakes reference pages.

ICIMOD's decadal analysis of Landsat imagery found that Nepal's glacier area shrank by about 24 percent between 1977 (2033–34 BS) and 2010 (2066–67 BS), with estimated ice reserves down about 29 percent, and the glacierised share of the country falling from 3.6 to 2.6 percent. Paradoxically, the number of glaciers rose from 3,429 to 3,808 because retreating ice bodies fragmented into smaller pieces, even as some 163 small glaciers disappeared outright.

Retreat behaviour varies with size, elevation and debris cover. Small, clean glaciers like Yala retreat visibly at the front — around 8 metres per year on average since the 1970s — while Rikha Samba's snout has pulled back even faster, at about 18 metres per year. The giant debris-covered glaciers, Ngozumpa and Khumbu, barely move their termini but are deflating from the surface downward, with ice cliffs and supraglacial ponds accelerating the decay.

The trajectory is accelerating. ICIMOD's 2023 'Water, ice, society, and ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalaya' (HI-WISE) assessment reported that the region's glaciers disappeared 65 percent faster in 2011–2020 than in the previous decade, and could lose up to 80 percent of their current volume by 2100 under high-emissions scenarios. For Nepal that means shifting river flows in the Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali basins, growing glacial-lake outburst flood risk, and long-term consequences for hydropower, irrigation and mountain tourism.