KATMANDU, Nepal -- A plane crashed into a mountain in the Himalayas while trying to land at an airport in northern Nepal on Monday, killing 15 people and critically injuring six.

The plane hit a mountain while it was turning around to land at Jomsom Airport, said Laxmi Raj Sharma, chief government administrator in the area. The wrecked aircraft was in pieces but did not catch fire.

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Sharma said initial investigations show that the plane might have suffered technical problems. The airport is at 8,800 feet elevation, where flying is more difficult.

'Hit a muddy slope'
Sharma said survivors were flown to the nearby city of Pokhara for treatment.

Police official Binod Singh told AFP that the plane "hit a muddy slope and the plane is now buried in the side of the hill."

Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai issued a statement expressing condolences at the deaths of the 15 people.

Police official Nareswor Aryal the plane carried two pilots and a flight attendant -- all Nepalese -- along with 16 Indians and two Westerners. Aryal couldn't immediately say where the Westerners are from. However, AFP reported that two Danish nationals were among the passengers.

The airport is a gateway to a popular destination for trekkers and for Hindu pilgrims on their way to the revered Muktinath temple. It is about 125 miles northwest of the capital, Katmandu.

The Dornier aircraft belonged to the local Agni Air company.

The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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Some glaciers in the Himalayas mountain range have gained a small amount of mass between 1999 and 2008, new research shows, bucking the global trend of glacial decline.

The study published on Sunday in the Nature Geoscience journal also said the Karakoram mountain range in the Himalayas has contributed less to sea level rise than previously thought.

With global average temperature rising, glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets melt and shed water, which contributes to the increase of sea levels, threatening the populations of low-lying nations and islands.

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 The research at France's University of Grenoble estimates that the Karakoram glaciers have gained around 0.36 feet to 0.72 feet per year between 1999 and 2008.

"Our conclusion that Karakoram glaciers had a small mass gain at the beginning of the 21st century indicates that those central/eastern glaciers are not representative of the whole (Himalayas)," the experts at the university said.

The study appears to confirm earlier research that had suggested the Karakoram glaciers have not followed the global trend of glacial decline over the past three decades. The mountain range's remoteness had made it hard to confirm its behaviour.

The Karakoram mountain range spans the borders between India, China and Pakistan and is covered by 7,700 square miles of glaciers. It is home to the second highest mountain in the world, K2.

"We suggest that the sea-level-rise contribution for this region during the first decade of the 21st century should be revised from +0.04 mm per year to -0.006 mm per year sea-level equivalent," the study said.

The Himalayas hold the planet's largest body of ice outside the polar caps and feed many of the world's great rivers, including the Ganges and Brahmaputra, on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

The world's glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets have shed around 1,000 cubic miles from 2003 to 2010, experts suggest, which is enough to raise sea levels by 12mm over that period.

Stephan Harrison, associate professor in quaternary science at the UK's University of Exeter, said the new research had showed there is "considerable variability" in the global climate and in how glaciers respond to it.

The Karakoram glaciers are also unusual because they are covered with thick layers of rock debris, which means their patterns of melting and mass gain are driven by changes in that debris as well as in the climate.

Much of their mass gain also comes from avalanches from the high mountains surrounding them, Harrison said.

"Overall, the impact of melting glaciers such as these on sea level rise is known to be negligible, but it does mean that there is much more to be learnt about exactly how the world's glaciers will respond to continued global warming," he added.

A separate study in February found that Himalayan glaciers and ice caps as a whole were losing mass less quickly than once feared, offering some respite to a region already feeling the effects of global warming.

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Are global warming skeptics being armed with a new weapon? Estimates from satellite monitoring suggest the melt rate from the Himalayas and other high-altitude Asian mountains in recent years was much less than what scientists on the ground had estimated, but those monitoring the satellite data warn not to jump to the skeptical conclusion.

The region's ice melt from 2003-2010 was estimated at 4 billion tons a year, far less than earlier estimates of around 50 billion tons, according to the study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

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But study co-author John Wahr, a physics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, emphasized that it's important to note that the region is a small contributor to overall ice melt and that the satellite estimates for the largest contributors, Antarctica and Greenland, are in line with ground-based estimates: about 385 billion tons a year.

"It's Greenland and Antarctica that pose by far the greatest threat to rising sea levels in the future," he told msnbc.com. "That's, basically, where all the ice is."

In the study itself, the authors also noted that the Asian mountain region has seen a lot of variability in ice melt and that the time period might be too short to be of much use. "These results suggest that care should be taken in extending the 2003–2010 results presented in this paper to longer time periods," they wrote in the study published online.

One potential reason for the huge difference, Wahr noted, is that scientists on the ground are limited to where they can sample the ice.

The NASA satellite used for monitoring, on the other hand, can cover the entire globe and its 200,000 glaciers.

Dubbed GRACE, the satellite "does this by mapping out the Earth's gravity field, all over the globe, every month," Wahr said.  

Satellite tracks where ice is melting

"One way to think of this is that as GRACE passes over Alaska, say, it feels the gravitational pull of all the Alaskan glaciers," he added. When it passes over Alaska later on, it also feels the pull of all those glaciers, but now that pull is smaller because there is less mass in those glaciers to do the pulling. So you end up learning about the change in the cumulative mass of all those glaciers. You don't miss any of the glaciers; you see the combined effects of all of them."

"The price you pay with GRACE," he said, "is that because you're 500 kilometers above the Earth, you can't distinguish the effects of an individual glacier from the effects of its neighbor. Individual glaciers are usually just too close to one another for you to separate them in the GRACE data. If you want to know what individual glaciers are doing, you need to rely heavily on those traditional, ground-based methods."

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