Research Dossier:
Mapping the Environmental Impacts of the Siachen Glacier Military Occupation
Hamza Jilani
March 2024
Precedent Projects
Ravi Baghel and Marcus Nüsser: Securing the heights: The vertical dimension of the Siachen conflict between India and Pakistan in the Eastern Karakoram
Through a “critical analysis of publicly available documents, news reports, and secondary literature, with an emphasis on primary accounts of direct participants in the Siachen conflict,” as well as satellite imagery and historical maps, Ravi Baghel and Marcus Nüsser place Siachen in what they see as its equally important political and topographical contexts to identify why the dispute exists where it does.
They note that they had difficulty while using cartographic and satellite-based methods to illustrate the spatial dimension of the conflict and uncover the contribution of cartography to the conflict because direct observation is limited to solely military personnel and Indian government-sanctioned tourism while classified and restricted documents and primary data proved hard to access. The authors imply that the political significance and environmental extremities of the region also complicate the efficacy of glacial remote sensing and access to relevant data in the area, as both tend to restrict the ability of existing technology to provide accurate and useful topographic data, just as I mention in my research statement. These cartographic methodological considerations are especially pertinent to my investigation of how Asian militaries manipulate, change, and interact with the glacial regions of the Himalayas, as a great deal of relevant observational data, especially regarding how military operations and infrastructures have changed and interacted with the environments that they are directly situated in, can be collected through similar satellite-based methods. I have faced similar challenges as Baghel and Nüsser as I have attempted to uncover details about military bases from satellite imagery due to a deliberate lack of available or unclassified information about military operations at Siachen. Moreover, though direct observation would be a helpful tool for my research, like the authors, I am unable to access a great deal of this data due to political limitations; thus, news reports, secondary literature, and publicly available documents are critical to my research. These limitations are critical to shaping the actual military conflict as well as shaping the kind of observation that is possible in service of my Digital Geographies of Climate Justice-framework.
The authors use a timeline and historical political as well as satellite maps to illustrate the geospatial nature of the conflict. Since many of the political or military events on the timeline have geospatial implications, this piece’s forms of geographical representation got me interested in trying to build out a representation that bridges these two illustrations. Moreover, the context provided by the historical and topographical maps used in this precedent project informed my investigations into critical events and areas on the glacier that helped me pick out areas and events of interest for my own project. The piece’s methodological emphasis on a broader historical context, especially with regards to warfare at Siachen being influenced by the historical military tradition of Gebirgskrieg, also compels me to attend to historically situating the conflict as I answer my research question through a timeline that provides necessary geopolitical context.
Finally, it is important to understand, especially with regard to my critical metadata for the sources I use in my research, the politics of the sensing technologies that the authors use for politically and geographically contextualizing Siachen, especially since I am essentially using similar sensing methods to temporally, historically, and ecologically situate this political and geographical context. The difficulty of ground surveys and the seeming impossibility of war on such inhospitable terrain resulting in inconsistent cartographies was also directly tied up in the emotional resonance of the boundary map of India as Bharat Mata – or Mother India – and the affects of heroism and military might associated with Siachen being a laboratory of high-altitude extreme warfare. These are important affective considerations for my attempts to develop a timeline that centers the glacier while telling a holistic geospatial story of how Asian militaries manipulate, change, and interact with the glacial regions of the Himalayas. The vertical dimension’s influence on the affect, representation, and military logic of the Siachen conflict and what Baghel and Nüsser see as the genesis and protractedness of the conflict are critical aspects of this military interaction. Ultimately, this piece was key to my understanding of the affective and cultural significance of the area, and I intend to refer to it to geopolitically contextualize my map.
Vibhor Agarwal, Tobias Bolch, Tajdarul H. Syed, Tino Pieczonka, Tazio Strozzi and Rishabh Nagaich: Area and mass changes of Siachen Glacier (East Karakoram)
This study used satellite datasets, including Landsat, Hexagon, Cartosat-I, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar and Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite Phased Array-type L-band SAR to understand its area and elevation change, velocity variations and mass budget. Eventually, the authors find that “the total areal extent of Siachen Glacier did not change significantly between 1980 and 2014; however the exposed-ice area decreased during that period. The terminus of the glacier has experienced substantial downwasting [...] over the period of 1999–2007, followed by a retreat of the transition between exposed and debris-covered ice by a distance of 1.3 km during the short span 2007–14.”
The article’s introduction provides critical ecological context for the significance of my investigation, especially since both my investigation and this paper attempt to model environmental changes at Siachen. The introduction explains that modelling these changes is important because the status of Karakoram glaciers has direct impacts on global water cycle, sea-level rise, freshwater availability, and flood and drought risk because these glaciers are important sources of freshwater for the Indus Basin, one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, and glacial monitoring is crucial for identifying regional effects of climate change. I aim to eventually highlight these aspects in my visual representation of broader glacial changes. I believe that highlighting critical flows of snow and glacial melt and downstream discharge could do this using optical and radar sensor data. This would provide context for the (literal) downstream effects of individual events on the glacier.
The article's data and methodology sections provided me with valuable insight into the kind of data that can be used for analyzing changes in glacial area, mass budget, and velocity as well as how the data might be collected and utilized in service of a project seeking to model environmental changes, even if this particular piece had a very specific view of the kind of ecological effects that necessitated study while my project seeks to include a more holistic and visually representable study of ecological-military interactions. Hence, true-color and optimized true-color satellite imagery are more relevant to my study. The study used Cartostat for the digital elevation modelling of the glacier, noting that the radiometric and spatial resolutions as well as the time difference between acquisitions of the members of stereo image pairs make this dataset especially useful for modelling glacial changes. I would eventually like to use data from Cartostat to incorporate changes in mass budget in my project’s timeline slider that shows change in the glacier and region over time in order to incorporate more specific and climate change-relevant information within my representation of ecological change.
The study also used Landsat L1T products to improve radiometric, geometric, and topographic accuracy. Landsat is one of the datasets I am working with to illustrate changes in specific event-areas over time, so my investigation has been informed by the best practices mentioned in the article's description of their manipulation of this data, which necessitated using scenes with <30% cloud cover acquired at the end of the ablation period starting from July to August that had minimal seasonal snow. Debris-covered ice was mapped manually in this study using Landsat color composites SWIR, NIR, and RED, which compelled me to investigate and use the necessary bands to create these kinds of composites to model the direct environmental impacts of specific ecological-military interactions.
In order to visually represent the ecological impacts of glacial changes at a broader level than my event-specific level, the article presents figures that show the extent of exposed-ice on the lower tongue of the glacier from 1980-2014 as well as velocity patterns for different seasons. I appreciate the visual clarity of this kind of a representation of ecological change on the glacier, and I aim to model these ecological changes through some kind of a time series like this. Though the overarching slider timeline I use in my project as it currently exists utilizes natural-color imagery, which already provides a sufficient representation of changes in snow cover to some extent (Sentinel Hub EO Browser also recommends using these bands to visualize snow and glaciers), I would like to use false-color images to incorporate more detailed changes in the interactive timeline portion of my project that highlights broader ecological changes at Siachen over time.
Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture): The Battle of Ilovaisk
This precedent project is critical for building out the kind of visual representation that I intend for the interactive app ‘end product’ of this project to be. Forensic Architecture, in this project commissioned by the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC) and the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group (ULAG), gathered open source evidence of Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine during the 2014 Battle of Ilovaisk in support of a legal claim against the Russian and Ukrainian states.
Although the particular context of this investigation was, unlike my other highlighted precedent projects, not situated at the Siachen Glacier, as an investigation of a conflict in a border region (the Battle of Ilovaisk occurred in the border region of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine) and one in which militaries competing over land that is extremely tied up in nationalist imaginaries was of particular interest, this project provides my own study of Siachen Glacier with important considerations for geospatially studying nationalist border conflicts.
Due to the open source nature of the evidence generated by communities of researchers, reporters, and citizen journalists, the Battle of Ilovaisk project involved the verification, geolocation, and contextualization/investigation of over 150 incidents, which necessitated uncovering and assembling evidence from thousands of sources. This methodology presented some challenges for the researchers: many hours of video footage must be sifted through to find evidentiary material and much of the material is irrelevant. Thus, Forensic Architecture automated some of this process, deploying pre-trained machine learning classifiers trained to recognize military vehicles and tanks – they experimented with training classifiers on 'synthetic' photorealistic digital images – to search YouTube according to a set of terms and analyze these videos frame-by-frame. I am running into a similar difficulty as I sift through open source data on the internet to find significant events to map and analyze for my own project; many events, even if they are reported on in the news, are difficult to find specific corresponding geographic locations and satellite imagery for, especially given the secrecy and material difficulty of remote sensing at Siachen. Thus, I am interested in learning more about how I might be able to similarly automate the ‘event’ datamining aspect of this project.
This precedent project is especially relevant to my own project for its representational form. The platform Forensic Architecture used to present their evidence in this project was an instance of TimeMap, an open source codebase they developed to create interactive cartographic platforms to reveal connections in time and space between incidents and events. The platform allows users to move back and forth throughout the timeline of the battle and explore unique instances grouped by their association with distinct militaries and types of operation. Each ‘event’ shows the user a card with its time and date – contextualized with its distance from relevant places or events – as well as a summary and a link to the source video, image, or article. I aim to build out a platform that effectively has some of these very same characteristics in order to reveal the connections in time and space between incidents and events pertaining to military operations at Siachen Glacier. I intend for my framework to reflect the timeline-integrated map where ‘events’ are mapped on both an interactive timeline and map and users can learn more information about events by clicking on them and being shown an informational card that provides necessary geopolitical context for the event as well as zoomed-in timelapses of the areas so that they may visualize the military-ecological interactions associated with the event.
Moreover, given that this platform was the first example of an evidence submission before the European Court on Human Rights that involved interactivity and machine learning techniques, my own platform, which would be developed in a parallel manner, might be able to be presented as an evidence submission before human rights or environmental courts, especially as the Kashmir conflict and the ecological implications of military activity at such a significant glacier are of international importance. Thus, in addition to having clarity and interactive nature, this kind of platform might be of international legal significance.
Other Precedent Projects
- Vineet Diwadkar: Himalaya: Extreme Territories of Urbanization
- Urbanization and related infrastructure projects in the Himalayas have served to encourage the privatization of planning, construction, and management of hydrological interventions. The piece explores speculative cartographies of emergent "operational landscapes" but reflects the continuity within the research of globalizing glacial politics by expanding the implications of glacial urbanization.