A Letter to My Beloved Thovina Glacier

My dear Thovina Glacier (Ladakh),
Please don't melt. Please don't change yourself.
This world has grown cruel and its people are blinded by greed, racing to grow their economies without pausing to ask what they are truly winning or what they are losing in the process. They fight battles they don't understand and they celebrate victories that cost the earth everything. I try to tell them but they don't listen.
But you, please you stay.
Don't change yourself for these foolish people. I am begging you because there are still good souls on this planet who love you deeply and fiercely. The families whose goats drink from your streams, whose animals survive because of you, whose entire lives exist because of you, they know your worth. They understand what you mean. It is for them and for all of us that I ask you to hold on.
Please don't get heartbroken because of what these careless people are doing to this world. Because when you get heartbroken you bleed, and that bleeding becomes a glacial lake outburst flood that rushes down and hurts the same people who love you, the same people who live under you, the same people who depend on you for everything. They don't deserve that pain. So please don't break. Hold yourself together for them.
Please don't lose your weight. You look magnificent the way you are, heavy and full and alive with mass. Don't listen to the damage being done around you. You are the most beautiful when you are whole and healthy. You are loved.
I will visit you every single year. I promise. I am coming not just as someone who cares but as someone who has studied, as a glaciologist and as a researcher, and I will bring every instrument and every tool and every method of remote sensing and analysis I have, like careful needles and injections, to understand you and to fight for you.
I will not let you be heartbroken.
The wars, the carbon, the rising temperatures, the climate that keeps changing because of greedy hands, I see it all. But I also see the ones who are fighting back for you. Sonam Wangchuk and the Ice Stupa Project, Acres of Ice, Glaciers Watch, Guardians of Glaciers, Voice of Glaciers, a growing family of people who refuse to give up on you. I stand with all of them.
I will never leave you Thovina.
Please be there when I come.

-Suhail Khan, glaciologist in training

India