Hot summer fuels dangerous glacier melting in Central Asia

Dushanbe, Tajikistan

IT began with a low rumbling noise. Then the rivers of mud poured down the mountainside over the Tajik village of Barssem: the latest victim of shrinking glaciers that are an alarming portent of climate change in Central Asia.

"The gorge was filled by a terrible noise - the roar of stones," said villager Shakarbek Kurbonbekov. "The mud took everything in its path - homes, cars," he told AFP by phone. "Those that could, escaped to higher ground. There was no time to think."

The 60-year-old man survived the disaster that hit the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan's mountainous eastern regions last month, but many others didn't - the mudslides and flooding claimed at least 12 lives and destroyed close to 100 ho…