There is one big tear on planet Earth.
You read it well: when looking from space, planet Earth seems to be crying over that land that humans call Pakistan, these days.
The land that hosts most glaciers on this planet (after the poles) is now hosting one big tear that is clearly visible from space.
The land that hosts most glaciers on this planet (after the poles) has experienced an extreme weather event during March-April 2022: basically instead of Spring they already had Summer.
The temperatures have been extremely high this year on the land that hosts most glaciers on this planet (after the poles), reaching 48 Celsius degrees (118.4 °F) in the cities of Nawabshah and Jacobabad on April 20, 2022.
Higher temperatures mean more humid weather and heavier rains — higher temperatures also mean that ice melts more easily.
It almost looks like the Himalaya is coming down, fellow humans of planet Earth.
Looking from space, this is a madness that is going to end soon, one way or the other.
The images below show the Sindh Province of Pakistan seen from space in September 2019 (left), and in September 2020 (right), when the heavy monsoon rains made the Indus river inundate, and almost 70,000 people had to be relocated from the places where they lived. The situation was concerning enough to be monitored from space.
Almost two years later, this is the situation in the same piece of land: this time more than 30,000,000 people had to be relocated. Thirty million. A new lake has formed, tens of kilometers wide. All that area was land, and now it is under water.
This is the calmest, quietest time of our lives, until us living in the Global North (mainly rich countries in the northern hemisphere of this planet) keep on extracting, burning, and selling fossil fuels.
Today is the land we call Pakistan to have 1/3 of its inhabited land submerged, but before tomorrow is going to be the land you are living in, my fellow human.
There is no escape, we all share one single planet, one single beautiful planet with a delicate biosphere that is in deep danger and requires our attention. It is the place where we are all living in: breathing its air, drinking its water, eating its food. It’s us.
There is one big tear on planet Earth,
on the land humans call “Pakistan” these days,
on the land with most glaciers after the poles,
there is one big tear that space travellers could see.