All Himalayan Highland Glaciers In Rapid Retreat Since 1990s

[hatrack]

"Shrinkage of highland glaciers in Asia, including one on Mount Everest, has intensified over the past decade due to global warming, a senior Chinese scientist said on Wednesday.

While two-thirds of the total glaciers began shrinking in the 1950s to 1960s, still about 10 per cent of the glaciers in the area advanced, and others remained unchanged, head of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Yao Tandong said.

EDIT

The Dadongkemadi Glacier near the Nyainqentanglha Range, for example, advanced 15.7 meters from 1989 to early 1994, but it began to recede in the summer of 1994. By 2001, the glacier had shrunk by 4.56 metres, Yao said in Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

However, he added, shrinkage of Asia's glaciers has intensified since the 1980s, and even more so in the 1990s, when all glaciers in the area were shrinking. Even the glacier on the Mount Qomolangma (Everest), the highest peak on earth, is shrinking, Yao said."

EDIT

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_941839,00040003.htm

[lutherj]

1. George Monbiot mentions this in a recent article

Goodbye, Kind World
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th August 2004

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/08/10/goodbye-kind-world-/


"...the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Bramaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years.(15) If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses, and the world goes into net food deficit."