UPI: Glacial melt in the Himalayas has been increasing over the last 30 years, says a new study

Study: Himalayan glacial melt accelerating

Glacial melt in the Himalayas has been increasing over the last 30 years, says a new study.

Khumbu glacier in the Nepali Himalayas. (Image credit: NASA)

Published: July 23, 2012

KATHMANDU, Nepal, July 23 (UPI) -- Glacial melt in the Himalayas has been increasing over the last 30 years, a new study argues.

The glaciers feed the Indus, Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers which supply water to around 1.4 billion people in Asia.

Potential consequences of changes in the glaciers include unsustainable water supplies from major rivers and geo-hazards such as glacier-lake outbursts and flooding, all which could threaten the livelihoods and well-being of populations in the downstream regions, says the study, led by Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Tibetan Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and glaciologist and paleo-climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University.

"The majority of the glaciers have been shrinking rapidly across the studied area in the past 30 years," Yao told Nature Climate Change, the journal that published the study.

A prolonged glacier retreat would increase the volume of water in rivers and also the sediments, which could choke water supply and disrupt agriculture, the study says.

While previous studies of Himalayan glaciers had been based on data over seven years from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission known as GRACE, Thompson said it's also important to look at the longer-term picture because climate is generally considered a 30-year average of the weather.
For example, the Naimona'nyi Glacier, which feeds the Indus River, had shrunk by 508 feet during the 30 years of the study, a rate of about 16.4 feet annually.

"We were surprised to find that at 19,849 feet [the height at which the glacier is located] there had been no net accumulation [of ice] since the late 1940s," Thompson told IRIN, the news service of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Separately, researchers at the Nepal Climate Observatory Pyramid, 16,663 feet high in the Himalayas, have lately focused on how "black carbon" -- fine soot and ash produced by diesel exhausts, thermal power plants, brick kiln smokestacks, and forest fires – may be accelerating the melting of ice and snow.

The U.N. Environment Program and some scientists and international research organizations say that increased black carbon deposits on Himalayan glaciers cause them to absorb more sunlight, thus accelerating glacial and snow melt.

"Although glacier melting is predominantly due to global temperature rise, the deposition of pollutant particles like black carbon can enhance this effect," says Paolo Bonasoni of the Italy's Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Inter Press Service reports.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2012/07/23/Study-Himalayan-glacial-melt-accelerating/UPI-49421343063494/

SciAm: Deny This: Contested Himalayan Glaciers Really Are Melting, and Doing So at a Rapid Pace – Kind of Like Climate Change

Deny This: Contested Himalayan Glaciers Really Are Melting, and Doing So at a Rapid Pace – Kind of Like Climate Change

by David Biello, Scientific American,July 27, 2012

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Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into Asia. Some contrarians back in 2010proceeded to deny that the glaciers of the Himalayas and associated mountain ranges were melting at all. But now, using satellites and on-the-ground surveys, scientists note that 82 glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau are retreating, 15 glaciers have dwindled in mass, and 7,090 glaciers have shrunk in size.

Why? The culprits include rising average temperatures characteristic of ongoing global warming and changes in precipitation, another sign of climate change, according to Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University and his colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study appeared online in the journal Nature Climate Change on July 15—and is bad news for the hundreds of millions of people who rely on such glaciers to feed water into major rivers such as the Ganges, Mekong or Yangtze.

But climate contrarians have moved on, of course. This June, atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the only remaining climate contrarians actually trained in climate science, dismissed the documented 0.8 degree Celsius rise in average temperatures in the past 150 years or so as a "small change" during a talk at Sandia National Laboratory. Yet, that small change has resulted in events like chunks of ice double the size of Manhattan breaking free of the ancient Greenland ice sheet last week. Just a few years ago, an even bigger ice-massif crashed into the sea. Events that once happened every few decades in Greenland now happen every year or so.

That “small change” has also been enough for weird weather to play havoc around the world, whether it be the epic drought currently over-baking Midwestern corn crops or the torrents of rain unleashed this year on Beijing, killing at least 77 people, according to the Xinhua news agency. The list of weather-related disasters continues to get longer with each passing year and, while no single weather event can be tied directly to climate change, our continuing fossil-fuel burning loads the climate dice in favor of more and more snake-eyes such as deadly floods or searing droughts. It’s all unfolding pretty much as predicted by climate scientists in the 1980s.

What’s also unfolding pretty much as demanded by climate contrarians is a dearth of efforts to address the problem, maybe because we’re all in denial. Global emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible for all this continue to grow, after taking a brief dip due to the Great Recession. Political and policy efforts to address the climate crisis, whether at the national or international level, seem spent (although there is some hope in efforts to buy time to combat climate change by cutting back on soot). Witness the climate talks in Durban, Cancun or Copenhagen. In the U.S. about the only leader still advocating for action to halt climate change is Bill McKibben, who has become somewhat of a climate Quixote, tilting for windmills and against the fossil fuel industry.

That industry, particularly titans such as ExxonMobil, has expressly achieved the goals laid out in an American Petroleum Institute memo from the 1990s recently reproduced in Steve Coll’s book Private Empire:

- Average citizen “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
– Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
– Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints challenging current “conventional wisdom”
– Those promoting the Kyoto treaty [a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions] on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.

All five of those items on the list can be checked off. That’s a big part of the reason why climate change has not featured as an issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.

What hope there is at present for addressing climate change in the U.S. lies in natural gas, dismissed as a nuisance for decades by the oil and coal industries.  The “last fossil fuel,” primarily the molecule known as methane, is itself a potent greenhouse gas. However, burning natural gas to generate electricity produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide—the most ubiquitous greenhouse gas—as burning coal does. Already, this year, burning natural gas accounts for as much electricity as burning coal for the first time in U.S. history, and its use has helped drop U.S. emissions by 430 million metric tons over the past five years, according to the International Energy Agency.

If fracking for shale gas can work for China too, global emissions could begin to drop (though it appears more likely at present that the U.S. will export highly polluting coal to China in greater quantities than any shale gas know-how). And if there’s enough natural gas—and there certainly is if we can learn to tap the methane molecules ensconced in icy cages throughout the world’s oceans—we might even use it to displace oil as the primary fuel for our cars and trucks.

[Readers, please note that shale gas and fracked gas create enormous "fugitive" emissions of methane, making these "extreme" fuels unviable, not to mention that fracking wells' production decreases by roughly 50% every year, meaning that the costs of production are not even earned, resulting in ever more loans to drill more such wells -- in essence a fracking gas Ponzi scheme.  Oh, yeah, and the millions of gallons of water each well requires, plus the concrete casings that will inevitably fail, forever contaminating the aquifers they pass through.]

At the same time, renewables, such as solar and wind, continue to grow by leaps and bounds, and nuclear power, though it may be moribund in the U.S., is gathering a renewed head of steam in countries such as China.

None of this will happen fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a sufficiently dramatic pace to stop climate change. After all, burning natural gas still means more CO2 molecules in the atmosphere trapping heat. Cheap natural gas will also likely slow the race to develop and deploy alternative energy as well as the sprint (in geologic terms) to a global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on track to achieve that over the next 40 years or so, with natural gas or without it.

That means that the people of 2100, or even 2500, will have us to blame if they don’t like the weather. In the shorter term, we’ll all have to learn to adapt to more sea level rise, weird weather, acidified oceans and other climate change impacts. The Earth is different now and will change even more—fewer and fewer glaciers at the Third Pole, less ice at the North Pole and, who knows, a few hardy plants taking root in Antarctica for the first time in millennia. There’s just no denying it.

Image: NASA Earth Observatory

About the Author: David Biello is the associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American. Follow on Twitter @dbiello.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/27/deny-this-contested-himalayan-glaciers-really-are-melting-and-doing-so-at-a-rapid-pace-kind-of-like-climate-change/

Glacier lakes: Growing danger zones in the Himalayas

Fears rise of huge outburst flooding in the Himalayas as glaciers melt due to climate change

• •  reddit this

• 
• • Suzanne Goldenberg at Imja Lake, Nepal
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 October 2011 13.29 EDT
  • Article history

Link to this video

It's strangely calming to watch the Imja glacier lake grow, as chunks of ice part from black cliffs and fall into the grey-green lake below.

But the lake is a high-altitude disaster in the making – one of dozens of new danger zones emerging across the Himalayas because of glacier melt caused by climate change.

If the lake, situated at 5,100m in Nepal's Everest region, breaks through its walls of glacial debris, known as moraine, it could release a deluge of water, mud and rock up to 60 miles away. This would swamp homes and fields with a layer of rubble up to 15m thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. But the question is when, rather than if.

Mountain regions from the Andes to the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average under climate change. Ice turns to water;glaciers are slowly reduced to lakes.

When Sir Edmund Hillary made his successful expedition to the top of Everest in 1953, Imja did not exist. But it is now the fastest-growing of some 1,600 glacier lakes in Nepal, stretching down from the glacier for 1.5 miles and spawning three small ponds.

At its centre, the lake is about 600m wide, and according to government studies, up to 96.5m deep in some places. It is growing by 47m a year, nearly three times as fast as other glacier lake in Nepal.

"The expansion of Imja lake is not a casual one," said Pravin Raj Maskey, a hydrologist with Nepal's ministry of irrigation.

The extent of recent changes to Imja has taken glacier experts by surprise, including Teiji Watanabe, a geographer at Hokkaido University in Japan, who has carried out field research at the lake since the 1990s.

Watanabe returned to Imja in September, making the nine-day trek with 30 other scientists and engineers on a US-funded expedition led by theMountain Institute. He said he did not expect such rapid changes to the moraine which is holding back the lake.

"We need action, and hopefully within five years," Watanabe said. "I feel our time is shorter than what I thought before. Ten years might be too late."

Unlike ordinary flash floods, a glacier lake outburst is a continuing catastrophe.

"It's not just the one-time devastating effect," said Sharad Joshi, a glaciologist at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan University, who has worked on Imja. "Each year for the coming years it triggers landslides and reminds villagers that there could be a devastating impact that year, or every year. Some of the Tibetan lakes that have had outburst floods have flooded more than three times."

But mobilising engineering equipment and expertise to a lake 5,100m up and several days' hard walking away from the nearest transport hub is challenging in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world. People living in the small village of Dingboche below the lake say scientists and government officials have been talking about the dangers of Imja for years.

Some years ago one of the visiting experts was so convincing about the dangers of an imminent flood that the villagers packed up all their animals and valuables and moved to the next valley. They came back after a week when the disaster did not materialise, but say it's hard to dismiss the idea that there could be a flood one day.

"When I was 21 I went to the lake and it was black and really small," said Angnima Sherpa, who heads a local conservation group in Dingboche. "Two years ago I went there and it was really big. I couldn't believe it could get so big. It was really scary."

But scientists and engineers still cannot agree on whether to rate Imja as the most dangerous glacier lake in the Himalayas, or a more distant threat.

Mobilising international assistance for large-scale engineering projects during a global recession is also difficult. The Mountain Institute's initiative was to call in experts from the Andes, where Peruvians have developed systems for containing glacier floods since a disaster in the 1940s killed nearly 10,000 people.

Cesar Portocarrero, who heads the department of glaciology at Peru's national water agency, has overseen engineering works to drain more than 30 glacier lakes, building tunnels or channels to drain the water and reduce the risk of flooding.

But he conceded it would be an enormous challenge to apply these methods at Imja.

"It's not easy to say 'we are going to siphon the water out of the lake'," Portocarrero said. "Where do you find the people who can work at high altitudes? How do you move in the equipment? What do you do in bad weather? You have to have exhaustive planning." There are also other contenders for immediate action, with some 20,000 glacier lakes across the Himalayas, although many are concentrated in the Everest region. Bhutan alone has nearly 2,700.

Three of those, known as the Lunana complex, are practically touching, increasing the possibility of cascading floods far more devastating than any rupture at Imja.

"If the barrier fails between them we are going to have a massive glacier lake outburst flood," said Sonam Lhamo, a geologist for the Bhutanese government.

The United Nations Development Programme and other agencies have supported a project to drain the lakes but those funds are running out.

John Reynolds, a British engineer and expert on glacier lakes who has worked in Nepal, argues that the international community has focused on Imja because of its proximity to Everest and trekking routes popular with western tourists. He says there are other, more hazardous lakes elsewhere.

The Nepali government ranks Imja among the six most dangerous glacier lakes in the country largely because it is growing so quickly. More than 12 other such lakes are also seen as high risk.

But Reynolds argued: "Just because a lake is getting bigger doesn't necessarily mean that it is getting more hazardous. As the climate is changing, generally speaking more glacial lake systems are forming.

"The question is how to decide which ones are hazardous now and which ones have the propensity to become hazardous in the future."

Imja, though fast-growing, is held in by a relatively wide moraine, which makes it secure in comparison to some others.

Most glacial lake floods begin as high-altitude tsunamis. A large block of ice falling from a glacier at great height sets off a series of giant waves that wash over the moraine.

That's not such a risk for Imja. The glaciers feeding the lake are gradual in slope, which reduces the risk of a large chunk of ice falling from a great height and setting off large waves.

Watanabe concedes the geography of the lake could keep disaster at bay, at least in the next year or two. But, he says, there are signs that an outlet channel at the bottom of the lake may be widening dangerously.

Reynolds said Nepal and the international community need to think of a Himalaya-wide action plan.

"As the climate is changing more glacial lake systems are forming," he said. "The question is how to decide which are hazardous now and which are going to become hazardous in the future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/10/glacier-lakes-melt-himalayas

Spatially heterogeneous wastage of Himalayan glaciers, PNAS, Koji Fujita & Takayuki Nuimura

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print August 1, 2011; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1106242108

Spatially heterogeneous wastage of Himalayan glaciers

1. Koji Fujita¹ and 
2. Takayuki Nuimura

1. Edited by James E. Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, and approved June 29, 2011 (received for review April 19, 2011).

Abstract

We describe volumetric changes in three benchmark glaciers in the Nepal Himalayas on which observations have been made since the 1970s. Compared with the global mean of glacier mass balance, the Himalayan glaciers showed rapid wastage in the 1970s–1990s, but similar wastage in the last decade. In the last decade, a glacier in an arid climate showed negative but suppressed mass balance compared with the period 1970s–1990s, whereas two glaciers in a humid climate showed accelerated wastage. A mass balance model with downscaled gridded datasets depicts the fate of the observed glaciers. We also show a spatially heterogeneous distribution of glacier wastage in the Asian highlands, even under the present-day climate warming.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/25/1106242108.abstract

Rajendra Pachauri: India 'arrogant' to deny global warming link to melting glaciers

India 'arrogant' to deny global warming link to melting glaciers

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri accuses Indian environment ministry of 'arrogance' for its report claiming there is no evidence that climate change has shrunk Himalayan glaciers

by Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian, Delhi, November 9, 2009

The Himalayas. The IPCC has warned that Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner”. Photograph: Frederic Soltan/© Frederic Soltan/Corbis

A leading climate scientist today accused the Indian environment ministry of "arrogance" after the release of a government report claiming that there is no evidence climate change has caused "abnormal" shrinking of Himalayan glaciers.

Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, released the controversial report in Delhi, saying it would "challenge the conventional wisdom" about melting ice in the mountains.

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN agency which evaluates the risk from global warming, warned the glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner".

Today Ramesh denied any such risk existed: "There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers." The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not "historically alarming".

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: "We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."

Ramesh said he was prepared to take on "the doomsday scenarios of Al Gore and the IPCC".

"My concern is that this comes from western scientists … it is high time India makes an investment in understanding what is happening in the Himalayan ecosystem," he added.

The government report, entitled Himalayan glaciers (pdf), looks at 150 years' worth of data gathered from the Geological Survey of India from 25 glaciers. It claims to be the first comprehensive study on the region.

Vijay Kumar Raina, the geologist who authored the report, admitted that some "Himalayan glaciers are retreating. But it is nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to suggest as some have said that they will disappear."

Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not "peer reviewed" and had few "scientific citations".

"With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago."

In a remarkable finding, the report claims the Gangotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded fastest in 1977 – and is today "practically at a stand still".

Some scientists have warned that the river beds of the Gangetic Basin – which feed hundreds of millions in northern India – could run dry once glaciers go. However, such concerns are scotched by the report.

According to Raina, the mistake made by "western scientists" is to apply the rate of glacial loss from other parts of the world to the Himalayas. "In the United States the highest glaciers in Alaska are still below the lowest level of Himalayan glaciers. Our 9,500 glaciers are located at very high altitudes. It is completely different system."

"As long as we have monsoons we will have glaciers. There are many factors to consider when we want to find out how quickly (glaciers melt) … rainfall, debris cover, relief and terrain," said Raina.

In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of "climate change deniers and school boy science".

"I cannot see what the minister's motives are. We do need more extensive measurement of the Himalayan range but it is clear from satellite pictures what is happening."

Many environmentalists said they were also unconvinced by the minister's arguments. Sunita Narain, a member of the Indian prime minister's climate change council and director of the Centre for Science and Environment, said "the report would create a lot of confusion".

"The PM's council has just received a comprehensive report which presents many studies which show clear fragmentation of the glaciers would lead to faster recession. I am not sure what Jairam (Ramesh) is doing."

Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/india-pachauri-climate-glaciers

Greenland ice and Himalayan glaciers: What’s going on?

Greenland ice and Himalayan glaciers: What’s going on?

by Quirin Schiermeier, The Great Beyond, Nature blog, November 13, 2009

Rising temperatures cause melting and retreat of large ice sheets, sea ice, and mountain glaciers – that’s pretty much common knowledge by now, as are implications on sea level, ecosystems, water supply and natural hazard risk. But a couple of news stories this week may cause confusion.

That the Greenland ice sheet is losing ice, and that mass loss has further accelerated in recent years, comes as no particular surprise. Using ground observations and satellite gravity measurements, a team led by Michiel van den Broeke from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, estimates that some 1,500 gigatonnes – roughly 1,500 cubic kilometers – have been lost from 2000-2008, equivalent to about 0.46 millimeters of global sea level rise.

Melting rates have accelerated since 2006, with mass loss reaching 273 gigatons of mass per year, equivalent to 0.75 millimeters of sea level rise. Without the moderating effects of increased snowfall, post 1996 mass losses would have been 100% higher, the team writes in a paper in this week’s issue of Science [subscription].

But the cryosphere – those parts of the globe that are permanently or seasonally covered by ice – does have surprises in store. Or so it seems.

Here’s one: Himalayan glaciers (there are tens of thousands of them of) are not – or at least not yet - shrinking as a result of climate change, the world learned this week from an Indian geologist.

“Although shrinking in volume and constantly showing a retreating front, [Himalayan glaciers] have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat,” concludes retired glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, in a report to India's Ministry of Environment and Forests.

“It is premature to make a statement that glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of global warming,” he goes on.

Following the release of the study – based on observations of 25 glaciers – India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh was quick to challenge the“conventional wisdom" about melting ice in the world’s tallest mountains.

Fellow Indian Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was put out: "We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement," he told the Guardian.

The IPCC had warned in its latest report, published in 2007, that Himalayan glaciers "are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, 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."

So what's going on? I asked Lonnie Thompson, a veteran glaciologist and leading paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University. Here’s what he said:

First and foremost this is not a peer reviewed report and nothing scientific can be claimed based on 25 glaciers out of over 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas and 46,300 in the Himalayas and Tibetan region.

Glaciers response time to climate change depends on their size; larger glaciers take longer to heat up and respond than smaller glaciers. Thus, in a mountain range such as the Himalayas with over 15,000 glaciers some will be stationary or advancing based on what climate change happened over 100 years ago. Some glaciers are surging glaciers that advance and retreat due to dynamics of ice flow and not climate. Glaciers do respond on the short term to increases in precipitation as well as temperature but with time temperature will win.

At the end of the day we have to go with the balance of evidence and that is true for glaciers as well. In short, if Jairam Ramesh can write up these results showing just how he came to his conclusion for a quality peer reviewed journal then he should do so.

Otherwise the report certainly does not challenge the conventional wisdom. I certainly concur with Ramesh that it is high time that the government of India makes investments in the study of the glaciers in the Himalaya's as they will certainly be impacted by their loss.

Link:  http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/11/greenland_ice_and_himalayan_gl.html