Report from SASNET funded research project on glacial lakes in Bhutan

Glacial lake BhutanIn 2009, Dr. Joyanto Routh, then affiliated to the Department of Geology and Geochemistry, Earth Sciences Centre, Stockholm University, was awarded a SASNET planning grant for a research project entitled ”High-resolution Holocene paleoclimate records in glacial lakes from the northeastern Himalayas in Bhutan”. The aim of the project was to initiate a reconnaissance study of accessible lake systems in the northeastern Bhutan Himalayas. Most of these glacial lakes directly lie in the path of the Indian summer monsoons and experience heavy rainfall. In addition, global warming has caused several of these glacial lakes to burst repeatedly posing danger for the local people and their property. The researchers focused on the pristine Lake Jimilangtsho located on the famous Druk Path trek between Thimpu and Paro. 
Fieldwork was carried out in October 2010 by a team from Örebro University (Joyanto Routh was affiliated to Örebro University during this period), the Department of Mines and Geology, Bhutan (Samten Wangdi) and the Department of Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata (Rajarshi Roychoudhary and Manoj Jaiswal). The depth of the water column at the points where the cores were collected ranged from 8 to 10 m. Since the reconnaissance sampling was conducted in 2010, geochemical analyses were done in these sediments. This resulted in a MSc thesis by Rajarshi Roychoudhary, which was submitted to the Department of Earth Sciences, IISER-Kolkata in May 2012. Read a complete activity report on the SASNET funded project.
Currently (June 2012), Joyanto Routh – now working at the Department of Water and Environmental Studies, Tema Institute, Linköping University – and his colleagues jointly work on a manuscript which they plan to submit after summer 2012. In addition, they are planning to submit a full proposal to research funding agencies to support their research initiatives with the Department of Mines and Geology at Bhutan in 2013.