glaciers

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part III of a three-part series

Glaciers and their immediate environs present many dangers for humans, such as crevasses and glacier mills into which one might fall, heavily crevassed ice falls, snow and ice avalanches from the side walls and, along the flanks, dumping of great boulders, ponding and floods from melt water. For these reasons, there are hardly ever permanent settlements on or right beside the ice. These are hazards mainly to mountaineers, hunters, travelers and military expeditions.

The more serious dangers arise from processes in the glacial environment that may extend their impacts beyond existing glacial areas. The more serious tend to involve ponding of water that leads to glacial outburst floods, or releases that generate debris flows.

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part II of a three-part series

As we saw in part one, climate change is obviously having different consequences in different mountain areas of Asia. The situation in the Karakoram must represent some distinctive conditions.

Three features of the regional environment seem critical. The first two relate to snowfall and the nourishment of these glaciers. They are intermediate in type between the summer accumulation (snowfall) glaciers of the greater Himalayas, and the winter accumulation glaciers of, say, the Caucasus and European Alps to the west. In each of the latter, more or less strong glacier retreat is reported.

Second, the zone of maximum precipitation in the Karakoram is much higher than in these and most other mountain ranges. It is also entirely within the accumulation zones of the glaciers. This relates to the third factor, the exceptional elevations and, especially, elevation range of these ice masses.

By Kenneth Hewitt, China Dialogue
Part I of a three-part series

Glaciers are quite sensitive to climate change and, recently, there have been many reports of major changes in the Himalaya and other parts of High Asia; mostly of glaciers retreating fast. Impacts of a range of glacier hazards, and on the reliability of water resources, are of concern at local, national and transnational scales.

However, there is also a growing recognition that glacial conditions in the region are very diverse, and so are their responses to climate change.

There are some very different implications in different societal contexts, not least in relation to rapid socio-economic changes, water resource projects and security crises. The latter are often more urgent or immediate problems that disrupt or undermine peoples’ capacities to adapt to environmental change.

The past decade has brought the dangers of climate change into sharp relief, often most clearly through images.

In the Arctic, scientific expeditions this year found increasingly thin ice and surprisingly open seas. Higher up, photographers documented the disappearance of glaciers, including some in the Andes and the Himalayas that provide fresh water to billions of people. On lower lands, drought threatened crops and lives from China to Kenya, Australia to California.

Here’s a look at some of the most worrisome environmental changes through the lenses of scientists, satellites, explorers and humanitarians.

As anthropogenic climate change gets more serious and more harmful, something happens to the earth’s fresh-water: there’s quite a lot less of it available for human consumption.

Climate change leads to higher temperatures. Higher temperatures lead to melting glaciers, so snow-melt-based water supplies decrease. Climate change also leads to more irregular rainfalls. Under most climate models, rainfall is predicted to occur more frequently in brief, furious bursts rather than the more sustained and regularized patterns that make it easy to store and irrigate crops.

A recently-released World Bank study notes that there is now strong reason to believe that rainfall variability will increase substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa, reducing GDP and heightening poverty. Previous evidence from Ethiopia, for example, showed that just one season of sharply reduced rainfall “depressed consumption” up to five years later.

And in the Middle East and North Africa, the world’s most water-stressed region, per capita water supplies were expected to halve by 2050 even in the absence of global climate change, the effects of a swelling population. The effects on agriculture will be unpredictable but unpleasant—agriculture amounts to 85 percent of the region’s water use.

Water is basic. When there’s not enough of it, people die. When there’s not enough to keep crops properly irrigated, there’s famine. So it’s not a big shock that when water decreases, conflict over it increases. Or to put it more simply, a lack of water leads to war.

Looking at pictures of the Andean ridges, running like exposed spinal columns down the Western flank of Latin America, one is struck immediately by their white tips.

Soon, pictures are going to be the only way to see that whiteness.

Peruvian glaciers have long been known to be melting; Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier is fast disappearing; and now experts say Colombia is on pace to lose all of its Andean glaciers in the next 25 years if current trends continue.

“There's been a sharp downward trend in snow coverage of several of Colombia's big glaciers particularly since 1985. If current rates continue, Colombia won't have any glaciers left by 2035,” Ricardo Lozano, head of the Colombian Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies, told a conference last month.

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First-hand scientific data of the fast-vanishing Petermann Glacier in Greenland's remote North will soon be available, thanks to Greenpeace.

The organization set off on a three-month climate impacts expedition on June 23, just as a Manhattan-sized iceberg started hemorrhaging off the ancient Petermann mass.

The group, and its team of independent scientists, will document the disintegration of the world's northernmost glacier and conduct additional research on the accelerating polar melt.

"Travelling to Petermann Glacier is a rare opportunity to visit a remote, hard to reach location at the top of the world, and a chance to make observations usually well beyond the capabilities of conventional science," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and member of the Greenpeace expedition.

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''Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists.''

–Edson Ramirez, head of a team of international scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991

At some unknown moment early this year, Bolivia's 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya Glacier – once the highest ski resort on Earth – officially vanished.

Its meltdown began in the mid-1980s. In 1998, Dr. Ramirez predicted its complete disappearance in 2015. His models were too optimistic. The rate of thaw tripled in the last 10 years due to accelerated climate change and quickened the death of the Andean glacier.

Ramirez, a leading glaciologist, proclaimed it a warning sign for the region:

"It's very probable that other glaciers are disappearing faster than we thought.''

This is consistent with recent research. In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that climate changes could melt away "most" of Latin America's tropical glaciers between 2020 and 2030. 

Mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears has been climbing in the Himalaya for almost 30 years. He's climbed to the top of Mount Everest five times --"four times too many" he says now -- and he knows the topography of the region about as well as anyone else on the planet. Now, rather than conquering mountains, he's using his knowledge and experience to conquer ignorance.

He has been combing the musty stacks of libraries and archives for old photographs of the Himalaya, and then going back to the exact locations to make modern pictures. He's come back with the evidence of the loss of glaciers all over the world, documenting the present and accelerating reality of global warming for all to see.

Last week, he was at the Asia Society in New York for a conference called Meltdown: The Impact of Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau  where he filled a wall with two panoramic images of Mount Everest and its surrounding glaciers. One was taken in 1921; the other, Breashears took in 2008.

Eyeball the pictures and you'll see less ice for sure; but you won't understand the enormous scale of the loss of ice until he explains it to you. He explained it to us on video.

Please watch it.

And if you don't know who Breashears is, here are a few facts for starters. He broadcast the first live television pictures from the summit  of Mount Everest in 1983. A decade later, he co-directed and co-produced the first IMAX movie shot on the world's highest mountain. In 1997, he made the first live audio webcast from the summit. He's won four Emmys and written a number of books. Just Google the guy and you'll get more than 62,000 hits.

Scientists closely monitoring the Antarctica Peninsula have just reported new rifts on the Wilkins Ice Shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the continent entirely -- and becoming a free-floating iceberg the size of Connecticut.

The rate of the melt is alarming -- some 15 years ahead of scientific projections.

The researchers, who are from the European Space Agency (ESA), reported the implications on the agency's website:

If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level since it is already floating. However, ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula are sandwiched by extraordinarily raising surface air temperatures and a warming ocean, making them important indicators for on-going climate change.

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