Colophon · the maker’s note · Kinetico · Pokhara · 28.2096°N 83.9856°E
444 of 447 have no name.उपसंहार
Four hundred and forty-seven glaciers stand in the Gandaki survey window above the city. Exactly three carry a name — Baibubu, Rikha Samba, and Jialakang. The other 444 are known only by number, and the register keeps them on the record anyway.
The concept
Himnadi is a fictional scientific institute in Pokhara that keeps the public register of the Gandaki basin’s glaciers — the ice that feeds the city’s rivers. The institute is invented. The glaciers, the numbers, and the flood are real: on 5 May 2012 the Seti rose without rain below Annapurna IV and seventy-two people did not see it coming.
The moat is authorship. Only a studio that lives under this ice can author the register of the mountains above its own city — the flood is local memory here, not a case file. That is the story this site tells, and the reason it could only be made in Pokhara.
The data pipeline
Nothing on these sheets is invented. The glacier outlines are drawn from an open scientific inventory; the terrain is a real elevation model, quantized to a compact binary grid so the relief travels light; the seismic record of the flood morning is pulled from the open FDSN services. Each source is named on the record below.
The one modelled element — the decadal snowline on the basin instrument — is provisional. The measured ICIMOD extents are not yet integrated, so the modelled portion is labelled as such wherever it appears. No figure on the site is fabricated to fill a gap.
- Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI 6.0) — RGI Consortium 2017 · doi:10.7265/N5-RGI-60 · CC-BY-4.0
- Copernicus GLO-30 DEM — European Space Agency · quantized to a compact binary terrain grid
- ICIMOD/UNDP 2020 — inventory of glacial lakes, Koshi–Gandaki–Karnali basins
- NASA Earth Observatory — orbital record of 5 May 2012 · public domain
- IC · New China Digital Seismograph Network — the seismic record of 5 May 2012, via EarthScope (IRIS DMC) open FDSN services · DOI 10.7914/SN/IC
The terrain engine
The basin instrument draws the survey window as an Imhof-style relief — computed shading, hypsometric tone, and contour work rendered in GLSL in the browser, directly from the elevation grid. The mesh swaps between two levels of detail (1024 and 2048) as you move, and the entire terrain travels the wire under one megabyte.
Navigation between chapters is a contour-line transition — the map redraws itself as its own loading state. A reduced-motion Print Edition renders every route as a static almanac plate, a second art direction rather than a fallback. And the flood morning is sonified: an in-browser sound core plays the seismic envelope of 5 May 2012 as it was recorded, the record arriving at the station in real time.
The accessibility play
Accessibility is the differentiator, not the compliance tax. Every route is fully keyboard-operable; focus is drawn as a survey crosshair rather than a browser outline; the register and the ledgers are semantic tables a screen reader can read down. Contrast is AA-or-better native to the paper palette — state is carried by weight, opacity, and underline, never by hue alone.
The Print Edition doubles as the reduced-motion surface: readers who ask for less motion get the almanac, not a broken page. The bar we set for ourselves was a second, complete art direction — the sheet you are reading is scored the same as the one that moves.
Credits/colophon
Designed and built by Kinetico, Pokhara. Type set in Newsreader and Fragment Mono with Anek Devanagari, numbers in Himnadi Figures — the institute’s own numerals. Sound synthesized in the browser; the 2012 sonification follows the seismic record.
On the roadmap, not yet shipped: original photography and field recordings from the basin, licensed display type, a full Nepali translation of the register, and the measured ICIMOD glacier extents that will retire the provisional snowline model.
Kinetico · Pokhara · 28.2096°N 83.9856°E