By Josh Chin (’07)

What’s the greatest benefit to living 44 kilometers from the source of one of northwest China’s most important rivers? For 22-year-old Li Ning, a core sampler on the country’s most studied glacier, it is undoubtedly the water.

“It’s fantastic,” the recent high school graduate told us as we stared at photos the water in its still-frozen form. “You can drink it cold and not get diarrhea.”

Li is one of five winter employees at the Tianshan Glaciological Station, a ramshackle collection of concrete bunkers buried deep the jagged Tianshan range in the heart of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Li and his colleagues, most of them unskilled workers hired in distant Gansu Province and sent here by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Insitute, spend December through April in the station with only a lion-voiced Tabby named Mimi, a pair of german shepherds and each other for company. Once a week, they trudge up the face of the nearby No. 1 Glacier—a horseshoe-shaped vastness of permanent ice that, like all glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, is becoming steadily less vast—in thinly insulated rain boots to take core samples and measure air temperatures. The rest of the time they sit around playing cards or watching TV and wait for summer, when two dozen scientists and graduates students arrive to conduct annual their annual experiemnts. For Li, who plans to one day start a family in this outpost of a province, there’s just one word to describe existence at the station: “Lonely.”

We had arrived at the station in the evening, riding four hours in a hired Toyota Landcruiser from the regional capital of Urumqi past parched potato fields to the top Houxia, a steep valley thick with smoke from concrete factories and coal mines set up along its floor. In China, where sipping unboiled water is usually tantamount to intestinal suicide, Li’s claim was a bold one. So bold, in fact, that Zachary Slobig (’07), my reporting partner, decided he had to test it for himself by capping off dinner with a glass taken straight from the tap in the station’s communal kitchen. The result? So far, so stable.

Traveling through this region in the 1920’s, American adventurer and Central Asian expert Owen Lattimore observed that much of the province “depends for life on the inexhaustible snow and ice of the T’ien Shan, the Heavenly Mountains.” But prisitine as it is, the water that flows down from these mountains may seems less and less likely to last. Owing to climate change, the total area of No. 1 Glacier fell by 20% between 1961 and 2001. And as temperatures continue to rise, the glacier continues to shrink.

The morning after our arrival, Li dragged us to 12,000 feet to show us what carbon had wrought: a 100-meter field of dry rock where the two branches of the glacier had once met. He needed no advanced degree to understand the implications of warming temperatures. Pointing to a group of a dozen or so antelope skipping over the rock above us, he grimly noted the animals’ dwindling numbers. “With the glacier melting, their habitat has gotten smaller. There are no predators left here. There are fewer of them because there is less food. They aren’t breeding as much.”

An hour’s drive south of the glacier, a family of herders revealed the human cost of rising temperatures. “There’s less rain in the winter now,” the family’s oldest son told us, standing on the parched hillside where they’d set up residence in a disintegrating log cabin. “We have to walk farther to find grass for the sheep, sometimes 10 kilometers or more.”

To be continued…