India, April 18 -- The rapidly changing climate has weakened swathes of the Himalayan glaciers and formed unstable chunks of ice that hang off steep slopes and can snap, setting off a slew of environmental disasters in Uttarakhand, a new paper has found.

The paper - led by the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, and the Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment - mapped 219 of these chunks, known as "hanging glaciers" in Alaknanda basin. These glaciers occupy steep slopes, with around 30% of them in the Upper Alaknanda basin, including areas such as Uttarakhand's Badrinath, said the paper, published on Friday in Nature's Natural Hazards journal.

These hanging glaciers, coupled with a rapid rise i...