Everest and Himalayan Glaciers Could Vanish By 2035, Imperiling a Billion People
by Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China on 11.25.08
Halong Glacier, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Greenpeace
I was gazing at Mount Everest recently. Considering all of the human and ecological drama surrounding this godly formation, I expected the mountain to look intense, battered even. But its serenity was so complete -- its summit so peaceful and normal in the sharp blue sky, with only the slightest whiff of snow blowing off its highest peak -- that I was sure it was hiding something, some unpleasant truth.
Gasping for air at the 5100 meter high base camp, near a military outpost, at the farthest point tourists can go before they begin an attempt, I stared at it hoping for some clue, and trying to burn its image at this moment into my mind. At the very least, I got a sunburn on my nose.
The mountain, Qomolangma, or ‘Goddess,’ in Tibetan, was oblivious. She didn't seem to notice her own sunburn, steadily melting her white gown of glacial ice. But the millions of people who depend upon the water that comes from that ice and that of all the Himalayas, which happen to contain the most ice after the polar caps, do care. And increasingly they have special reason to be concerned.
The snows of Everest could be gone in three decades. The prospects are chilling.
A leading Indian researcher, Syed Hasnain, chairman of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), argues that all the glaciers in the middle Himalayas are retreating and could disappear from the central and eastern Himalayas by 2035.
Less Every Year
As we began our drive back to Gyantse, Everest at our backs, I asked our guide about the river that trickled past base camp and alongside the road. "It's been lower every year since I started coming here" in 1996, said Ugay. "There's less snow every time."
Another recent study by researchers at Ohio State University found that high-altitude glaciers in the region are no longer accumulating ice.
As Greenpeace described in a report about its own trip to the area last year,
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has a staggering 46,298 glaciers. However, recent surveys via remote sensing and fieldwork have recorded a 10 percent reduction in the last three decades, from 48,860 square kilometres (18,865 sq miles) in the 1970s to 44,438 sq km (17,158 sq miles) today. The alarming acceleration of the retreat is being attributed to increased global warming.
The Fallout
By now, humans' direct impact on the climate -- thanks in part to China's record levels of CO2 production, thanks to the sort fossil fuels that are being increasingly extracted in Tibet -- has been well documented. But anyone doubtful about climate change's direct impact on humans would be advised to come to this spectacular frontier.
These glaciers act as what some have called the "water towers of Asia." Himalayas and Qinghai-Tibet plateau are the source of some of the world's major river systems: the Indus, the Ganga-Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze and the Yellow River. In China, India, Nepal and Bangladesh, almost one billion people live in the watershed areas of these great rivers.
Melting glaciers not only threaten to decrease access to water in the long term, and cause floods in the near term: water shortages in China and India could flare into serious cross-border water wars.
And the danger of these reductions in the Himalayan water supply could be exacerbated by the threat of carbon emissions on other fronts: desertification, drought and pollution.
Skepticism in Beijing
A researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences has questioned the claim that the glaciers could be gone by 2035. Instead he says, it's more likely to take another 50 years. For the Himalayan glaciers to melt completely would take a global temperature rise of at least 5 degrees, said He Yuanqing. During the 20th century, the average global temperature rose by about 0.74 degrees Centigrade.
But the IPCC predicts a rise in this century by between 1.8-4 degrees Centigrade. "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world," the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned last year. "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."
“We need to bring about mitigation actions to start in the short term even when benefits may arise only in a few decades,” said Rajendra K. Pachauri, the Chair of the IPCC, last year.
The difference between 1.8 and 4 degrees could be the difference between prosperity and despair for millions. And it's a difference we can make.
Fortunately, the next big opportunity to cut CO2 is just around the corner, next week in Poland. (Beijing, ni hao? You there, Washington?)
Peaceful in that bright autumn light, the snows of Everest harbor an inconvenient truth. Now is the time to face it, before it melts away.
Chandigarh Tribune, Geophysical Research Letters, Greenpeace
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The geography of Nepal is stunning for such a small country - from 8848m to 80m in less than 200km. When I was there circa 2006, photographing the Khumbu mountains, I thought to myself what the landscape might look like the next time I returned. Your well-written post, as it should, scares me, and I only hope that we can reverse our negative effects on the environment before it's too late.
Yes, glaciers are melting fast in the region and new glacial lakes are being fromed fast enough. What has gone unnoticed is the fact that many glacial lakes are ready to burst..that could wipe away all the habitat and infrastructure, and unfotunately nothing has been done to prepare the people of this region about suh possible danger.
http://www.yellowsandblues.com/iniDetail.php?id=10
Yay!
Is the story here that the glaciers are retreating? Or is this PR for opportunistic anti-China activists?
The disturbing feature of this article is the obsessive targeting of China as the sole and unique culprit of this ecological disaster. CO2 production is a global problem. China extrudes the gas because there is (or was) demand for cheap products in the rest of the world. American government scientists still deny climate change, too.
Benjam, thanks for your comment. This post was in no way intended to be "anti-China." And I think it would be a weak piece of evidence to justify an anti-China argument. What it is is sad proof of the effect that humans in China and the US -- the largest CO2 emitters in the world -- and others elsewhere are having on the earth. I think it is generally agreed that significant shifts in CO2 production cannot be made without both Washington and Beijing signing on. That half of Mt. Everest and part of the Himalayan glacier happens to be in Tibet -- a politically contested and ecologically fragile region to say the least -- is either some sort of poetic justice or precisely the opposite.