Thanks for the warm welcome! Strange goings on in fantasy maps are absolutely fine with me providing they are justified somehow...rivers are one of my things in particular, I must admit!

Thank you for the additional information - I'll be sure to explore around a bit more than I have done already. I'm just about to hop onto a train to take me back to South India which will take somewhere in the region of two days if I'm lucky but I've got my graph paper with me to do some sketches on the way.

I'm just downloading my photos from my trek - I've got some good ones of things like the snowline (taken with my geography classes in mind!) so I'll share them when I get back.

Glacier modelling is complicated...I had a winter time job in Sweden/Norway for a couple of years whilst I was at university doing some glacial monitoring though I'm not sure I ever really understood everything I was doing; I just did as I was told!

The snowline is also a slightly odd concept. The range can be anything from a couple of hundred meters to many thousands. I got up to 5,400m in January and there were only a few small patches of snow with glaciers still quite high above in the mountains. The permanent snowline is supposed to be somewhere around the 4,800m mark (summer) and decreases in winter. I went on a trekking holiday to the Austrian Alps in April and we crossed the snowline somewhere just over 2000m. However, as you probably know so many different other aspects play a significant role. Much of what we were walking through was desert and I've never been somewhere so barren in my life. Behind the mountains (north on the Tibetan side) there was so little moisture because of the rain shadow there wasn't any snow worth speaking about. I think the snowline was about 900m higher here than it was when we were in the south where there was more moisture putting it around the 6000m mark. In the Indian state of Sikkim (wedged between Nepal and Bhutan) it was at 3,900m mostly due to much higher levels of precipitation. In other words it is incredibly variable in such an immense range like the Himalaya.

As a very general rule average temperature decreases as latitude increases at a rate of 1oC for every 5o of latitude. The limitations of this are very clear when you compare countries like the UK with countries on the same latitude which are generally a lot colder in winter for a number of reasons. Temperature decreases with altitude a bit more predictably, about 6.5oC with every 1000m climb.

I'm sure I can do this better. I'm quite tired and just hanging around for a bit...I'll write some better stuff when I get back home.