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| Global warming may leave Mount Everest without glaciers |
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Standing a staggering 29,029 feet above sea level, Everest is the world’s tallest peak.
University of Milan graduate student Sudeep Thakuri used satellite images and topographic maps of the mountain and the surrounding Sagarmatha National Park to monitor changes in glacier coverage and snow lines.
His findings revealed that the ice atop Everest has shrunk 13 percent in the past 50 years, while the snow line has receded by 590 feet.
Results for Sagarmatha as a whole were similar, with glaciers retreating among the majority of the observed area. They have retreated 1,300 feet on average since the early 1960s, with glaciers measuring less than 250 acres disappearing fastest; this culminates in a 43 percent decline in overall surface area.
Glaciers are melting faster
“Because the glaciers are melting faster than they are replenished by ice and snow, they are revealing rocks and debris that were previously hidden deep under the ice,” said the Geophysical Union in a statement on the subject.
Using data from Nepal’s Climate Observatory stations and the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, Thakuri and his fellow scientists also tracked changes in both temperature and precipitation since 1992. They discovered that the former had increased by a single degree Fahrenheit while the latter had dropped by 3.9 inches.
This is unwelcome news to communities that rely on the water from glaciers in the Himalayas, where Everest makes its home.
A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that area glaciers will have all but vanished by the year 2035, though analysis by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite claims that actual melting is one-tenth the Panel’s prediction.
Even so, the Los Angeles Times quotes Thakuri elaborating further on the importance of the relationship between the Himalayan glaciers and surrounding populations: The “Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season.
Downstream populations
Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking and power production.”
Oddly enough, not all of the glaciers in the region are melting.
The Karakoram Mountains, located on the China/Indian/Pakistan border have not been experiencing any decline; in fact, they might even be growing.
While it is easy to point the finger at global warming as the cause, Thakuri admits that no definitive link has been established between rising greenhouse gases and the glacier melts in the Himalayas.
The Geophysical Union went on to say that Thakuri plans to continue studying climate-glacier relations further by integrating glaciological, hydrological, and climatic data.
The research is being funded by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Water Research Institute-Italian National Research Council.
(Source: Science Recorder)
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