Tibetan Glaciers Melting Rapidly

Tibetan Glaciers Melting Rapidly

Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply.

Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7200 metres above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming.

But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Professor Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and a team of researchers travelled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona'nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting.

Mountain glaciers have been receding all over the world since the 1990s and there was no reason this one, which provides water to the mighty, Indus, and Brahmaputra Rivers, should be any different.

But when the team analysed samples of glacier, what they found stunned them.

Radioactive signals

Glaciers can be dated by looking for traces of radioactivity buried in the ice. These are the leftovers from US and Soviet atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the Naimona'nyi samples, there was no sign of the tests. In fact, the glacier had melted so much that the exposed surface of the glacier dated to 1944.

"We were very surprised not to find the 1962-1963 horizon, and even more surprised not to find the 1951-1952 signal," says Thompson.

In more than twenty years of sampling glaciers all over the world, this was the first time both markers were missing.

He suspects the reason for this is that high-altitude glaciers, despite residing in colder temperatures, are more sensitive to climate change.

As more heat is trapped in the atmosphere, he said, it holds more water vapour. And when the water vapour rises to high altitudes it condenses, releasing the heat into the upper atmosphere, where high mountain landscapes feel the brunt of warming.

"At the highest elevations, we're seeing something like an average of 0.3°C warming per decade," says Thompson. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 3°C of warming by 2100. But that's at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6°C."

"I have not seen much as compelling as this to demonstrate how some glaciers are just being decapitated," says Associate Professor Shawn Marshall of the University of Calgary.

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The finding has ominous implications for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters of the Naimona'nyi and other glaciers for their livelihoods. Across the region, no one know just how much water the Himalayas have left, but Thompson says it's dwindling fast.

"You can think of glaciers kind of like water towers," he says. "They collect water from the monsoon in the wet season, and release it in the dry season. But how effective they are depends on how much water is in the towers."
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In a world where it warms by three degrees, we will see this beginning to happen more rapidly. The world based on current global climate events is now between two and a half and three degrees. The burning of fossil fuels which has now been scientifically linked to the exacerbation of climate change must be drastically cut within the next ten years to avoid a climate catastrophe. It is unimaginable to picture a world where we reach four degrees or above. In such a world the planet we call our home would be unrecognizable and our lives would change forever. War over water will be commonplace, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees would be seeking higher ground from Bangladesh and other low lying areas due to sea rise, which is already making itself known in these areas.

And it is not as if people in this world are not aware of what we are experiencing. Yet, we continue to waste water, mismanage it, and elect people to represent us who do not take the issue of water management and conservation seriously. We will rue the day we acted so cavalierly regarding this most precious resource. The glaciers of the Himalayas are only one of many glacier chains across the world losing mass more rapidly than even the IPCC predicted. We cannot as a species continue to be distracted by diversions while our world melts around us. We are on a collision course with our destiny. It is absolute arrogance to think we are omnipotant over nature and that we have no responsibility for our actions. To tempt fate due to apathy is to tempt our own demise.