Melting of the Himalayan glaciers that is threatening the kingdom of Bhutan will adversely affect the entire South Asian region, a new report has indicated.

According to a report in Nature News, glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating faster than in any other part of the world and they could disappear completely by 2035.

This puts the mountainous nation of Bhutan at a special risk.

In an area smaller than Switzerland, it has 983 glaciers and 2,794 glacial lakes, some of which have burst to produce deadly glacial lake floods.

As a poor nation without even its own helicopter, Bhutan lacks the resources to combat global warming.

It is carrying out the work at Thorthormi glacier with the help of money from various international donors.

As the first nation to get adaptation money from the Least Developed Countries Fund, Bhutan is something of a pioneer among developing nations in their quest to adapt to a warmer future, and the struggles at Thorthormi glacier illustrate the enormous obstacles that adaptation efforts still face.

It is only within the past decade that researchers realized that Thorthormi could pose a threat.

Thorthormi's ponds were expanding and merging to form larger bodies of water. The changes have been dramatic even in the past few months.

"Just before we started our work here in July this year, that part of the lake was water," said Karma Toeb, the project's glaciologist and team leader, pointing down to a number of icebergs. "The ice blocks have been breaking off the mother glacier upstream," he added.