OP Rana

Vanishing glaciers reveal the truth

By Op Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-04-11 08:03

For almost a month now, the world has been besieged with news of the ongoing consequences of the natural disasters in Japan and the man-made crisis in Libya. They deserve our attention, for they will have far-reaching repercussions. But there is something that has not received the attention it deserves.

That the Himalayan glaciers will not vanish by 2035, as the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) erroneously claimed, is well known. But while the exchange of e-mails among researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom was irresponsible and damaging, there is no denying that mountain glaciers across the world are receding faster than ever.

To be precise, in many places they are receding at the fastest rate since the "Little Ice Age" (1550 to 1850) - or since the height of the Industrial Revolution. And they are making sea levels rise faster today than at any time in the last 350 years.

In a detailed study conducted by the universities of Aberystwyth, Exeter (both in the UK) and Stockholm (Sweden), scientists from the three universities mapped the changes of 270 of the largest glaciers between Argentina and Chile.

Their study centered on images of the outlet glaciers of northern and southern Patagonia high in the Andes. The researchers mapped the changes in the glaciers' position since the Little Ice Age, which for the ice field in northern Patagonia took place around 1870 and for the southern around 1650.

The study is important as it is the first to directly estimate melting glaciers' contribution to sea levels since the Industrial Revolution.

The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday, shows that the glaciers have lost volume "10 to 100 times" faster on average in the past 30 years and their rapid melt rate has contributed to rising sea levels.

Lead author and professor at Aberystwyth University, Neil Glasser said earlier estimates of melting glaciers' contribution to rising seal levels were based on very short timescales - only the past 30 years or so - so they adopted a different approach that allowed them to look at longer timescales. Glasser said: "We knew that glaciers in South America were much bigger during the Little Ice Age so we mapped the extent of the glaciers at that time "

Even in the Himalayas, glaciers are melting faster than before. In July last year, photographs taken in Tibet autonomous region, Nepal and K2 in Pakistan, when compared with earlier shots taken from the same spots, showed the glaciers are in retreat.

The most famous of the photographs, showing the Rongbuk Glacier, was taken by the British climber George Mallory from the north face of Mount Qomolangma in 1921, three years before his death on the same mountain. It shows a powerful, white S-shaped bend of ice. The shots taken from the same spot by US mountaineer David Breashears in 2010 show the same glacier shrunken and withered. The Asia Society, which arranged for the photographs, said they reveal a startling truth, "an alarming loss in ice mass over an 89-year period".

A month before the photographs were taken, Nepal's Sherpa mountaineers said that the rate of ice and snow melt on Qomolangma had exposed bare rock faces and made it dangerous to climb. Other studies show temperatures are rising faster in the Himalayas, especially on Qomolangma, than in the rest of South Asia. This has reduced snowfall over the mountains and increased the melting of glaciers.

Despite all the evidence, climate change skeptics, the agents of the rich and powerful, still deny the truth. Perhaps the rich and powerful will not accept the facts till all the glaciers melt and all the rivers dry up and all the poor, weak and needy vanish from the face of the earth. But who will they fool and exploit when all the poor, weak and needy are gone?

The author is a senior editor with China Daily.