Project Statement

In the context of climate change, the rapid retreat of alpine glaciers is reshaping both upstream river infrastructure and socio-cultural values of mountain communities. The travel fellowship exhibition, led by a graduate landscape architecture student, investigates unstable glaciated landscapes in the Garhwal Himalayas, India, focusing on the 2013 and 2021 glacial lake outburst floods. By unpacking landscape change, it highlights the relationship between glacial geomorphology and mountain communities. As UNESCO and WMO have declared 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation, the exhibition serves as a foundation for transdisciplinary dialogue to rethink the role of landscape architecture in high-altitude mountain regions.

Project Narrative

Purpose: Often called the “Third Pole of the World”, the Himalayas are home to the largest number of alpine glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctica. These glaciated landscapes are not only vital freshwater reserves but also sensitive climate indicators. In the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand, India, glacial retreat is no longer an invisible process. It is perceived highly through frequent and devastating glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). These events have become defining moments for upstream mountain communities navigating the risks posed by glacial debris - sediment left behind by retreating glaciers. As a graduate landscape architecture student who has travelled and hiked extensively in the Garhwal Himalayas, witnessing these transformations firsthand shaped an embodied-disembodied relationship with glacial debris, becoming a lens through which to develop the consciousness of landscape change at both nature and personal scales.

Message: While landscape architecture has traditionally focused on sea-level rise in downstream coastal environments, upstream glacial-fluvial processes remain underrepresented in the field. By finding resonance in Gena Wirth’s quote from Unlock Alameda Creek: “We must look Upstream” for the conceptual anchor of traveling fellowship, the research and fieldwork focused on retreating glaciers of two sites: the Chorabari + Companion Compound Glacier in Kedarnath and the Hanging Glacier in Joshimath. These sites were chosen for their geomorphological complexity and for their roles in recent GLOFs - the 2013 Kedarnath disaster and the 2021 Chamoli disaster. Additional visits to nearby towns enriched an understanding of upstream infrastructural vulnerability, ecological shifts and memory of the place that challenges traditional notions of landscape stability.

Method: In the fall of 2024, the travel fellowship exhibition was designed to keep in mind one objective - to provide an opportunity for the diverse public to engage, gather, sense, discuss and connect themselves with retreating glaciers. From three-week fieldwork to assembling over nine months, the four-week inclusive and innovative public exhibition aimed at raising awareness of glacial-fluvial landscapes. Through ten themes - combining immersive walking experience, field maps, annotated photographs, sketches and interactive models, it portrayed the dynamic and temporal nature of the high-altitude terrain.

Audience: A 45-minute gallery talk accompanied the exhibition where storytelling played a central role in making glacial geomorphology concepts inclusive and accessible to link ice dynamics with lived experiences. The talk prompted questions on how the landscape architecture field might more meaningfully respond to upstream landscape vulnerabilities. Over 100 visitors engaged with the exhibition where conversations revealed a shared urgency to engage more deeply with landscapes in flux.

Distribution and Impact: A key insight was that retreating landscapes can act as media of communication and public engagement. Audience reflections and exhibition process were incorporated into a research booklet publication, extending the reach of the exhibition and inviting continued conversation. As UNESCO and the WMO declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, this work becomes especially timely. It calls for the landscape architecture community to reimagine glaciated regions as both ecological systems and cultural terrains in transition.