South Asia floods: Appeals for help as monsoon rains cause havoc in India, Nepal, Bangladesh

There is an urgent need for rescue and relief services on the Indian subcontinent as severe monsoon flooding spreads across India, Nepal and Bangladesh, leaving more than 1,200 people dead since the rains started.

Oxfam says two-thirds of Bangladesh is under water.

Oxfam said its Bangladesh staff reported two-thirds of the country was under water and in some areas the flooding was the worst since 1988, creating an urgent demand for humanitarian supplies.

Wide scale flooding in an arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills caused landslides and washed away tens of thousands of homes and vast swathes of farmland.

The UN said about 40 million had been affected.

Read the ABC News story - “South Asia floods: Appeals for help as monsoon rains cause havoc in India, Nepal, Bangladesh".

Journey to the third pole - 'Crisis on high'

The ancient Silk Road town of Dunghung of north
west China is fed by water from the melting glaciers.

Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than 1 billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos.

The station lies in the heart of a region called the Third Pole, an area that contains the largest area of frozen water outside of the North Pole and South Pole.

Despite its relative anonymity, the Third Pole is vitally important; it is the source of Asia's 10 largest rivers including the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy and the Ganges — and their fertile deltas.

Flows from the glaciers that give the pole its name support roughly 1.3 billion people in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — and the glaciers are melting fast.

Chinese authorities have opened up a remote research station on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and revealed alarming research on the pace of global warming.

Half a century of research shows the temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees in the area, more than double the global average. More than 500 glaciers have completely disappeared, and the biggest ones are retreating rapidly.

Read the ABC story by China correspondent Matthew Carney - “Crisis on high.”