tagged w/ Glacial lakes
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Climate change is altering the face of the Himalayas, devastating farming communities and making Mount Everest increasingly treacherous to climb, some of the world's top mountaineers have warned.
Apa Sherpa, the Nepali climber who has conquered Mount Everest a record 21 times, said he was disturbed by the lack of snow on the world's highest peak, caused by rising temperatures.
"In 1989 when I first climbed Everest there was a lot of snow and ice but now most of it has just become bare rock. That, as a result, is causing more rockfalls which is a danger to the climbers," he told AFP.
"Also, climbing is becoming more difficult because when you are on a mountain you can wear crampons but it's very dangerous and very slippery to walk on bare rock with crampons."
Speaking after completing the first third of a gruelling 1,700-kilometre (1,100-mile) trek across the Himalayas, Apa Sherpa would not rule out the possibility of Everest being unclimbable in the coming years.
"What will happen in the future I cannot say but this much I can say from my own experiences -- it has changed a lot," he said an an interview with AFP in the village of Gati, 16 kilometres from Nepal's border with Tibet.
The 51-year-old father-of-three, dubbed "Super Sherpa", began his working life as a farmer but turned to the tourism industry and mountaineering after he lost all his possessions when a glacial lake burst in 1985.
He is on a 120-day walk dubbed the Climate Smart Celebrity Trek with another of the world's top climbers, Nepali Dawa Steven Sherpa, with the pair expected to reach the finish on May 13.
The expedition, the first official hike along the length of Nepal's Great Himalayan Trail since it opened last year, will take in some of the world's most rugged landscapes and see the duo ascending beyond 6,000 metres (19,600 feet).
"I want to understand the impact of climate change on other people but also I'd like tourism to play a roll in changing their lives as it has changed mine," said Apa Sherpa.
Research published by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) last year showed Nepal's glaciers had shrunk by 21 percent over 30 years.
A three-year research project led by ICIMOD showed 10 glaciers surveyed in the region all are shrinking, with a marked acceleration in loss of ice between 2002 and 2005.
Scientists say the effects of climate change could be devastating, as the Himalayas provide food and energy for 1.3 billion people living in downstream river basins.
Environmental campaigners refer to the mountain range as the "third pole" and say the melting glaciers are the biggest potential contributors to rising sea levels after the North and South Poles.
Scientists blame confusion and scepticism over climate change on a blunder in a 2007 United Nations report which falsely claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by as soon as 2035.
On the ground, however, mountain communities are already alarmed by dramatic shifts in weather patterns, two-time Everest summiteer Dawa Steven Sherpa told AFP as he and Apa completed the first 530 kilometres of their trek.
"Right from the beginning we saw the effects of climate change on tea plantations in Ilam district," he said.
"These areas would not normally get frost and it is destroying their entire crop. These are cash crops that employ thousands of people, even on one farm.
"From what the local people are saying, it's getting colder in the winter and hotter in the summer and it is the cold they are worried about."Climate change is altering the face of the Himalayas, devastating farming communities... more
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India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan were part of the Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas held in Bhutan's capital Thimphu on Saturday. They agreed to cooperate on energy, water, food and biodiversity issues.
"The success of our initiative will not only have direct and immediate benefits for our own people, but we could be setting a worthy precedent for other countries that share similar conditions," Bhutan's Prime Minister Lyonchhoen Jigmi Y. Thinley said according to a press statement released late Saturday.
Pakistan, China and Afghanistan were absent from the summit but organizers downplayed that, saying that the summit was focused on securing ecosystems, endangered species,and food and water sources for only the Himalayas' eastern part.
The summit called for action amid the international community's inability to agree on limiting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global climate change. The next round of U.N. climate talks begin in Durban, South Africa Nov. 28, but the expectations of any breakthrough there are limited.
As part of the declaration the four nations agreed to work together to increase access to "affordable and reliable" clean energy resources and technology through a regional knowledge sharing mechanism, a press statement from the World Wildlife Fund said.
The draft of the declaration was not immediately available Sunday.
The most contentious part of the talks dealt with water security, according to the WWF release, but the four nations did agree to work together on ecosystem and disaster management, sharing their knowledge in water use efficiency.
Regional tensions have long prevented Himalayan cooperation, including basic research in the world's largest block of glaciers outside the polar regions, and accounting for 40 percent of the world's fresh water.
There was also consensus on food security and securing livelihoods and the deal covers way to adapt and improve food production and help vulnerable communities get better access to nutritious food.
"These kinds of regional initiatives are really needed," said Liisa Rohweder, CEO of WWF Finland, adding the summit was a good lead to follow for the Durban meeting.India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan were part of the Climate Summit for a Living... more
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Melting glaciers in the Himalayas put the small Kingdom of Bhutan at risk. Not only are the “frozen reservoirs” a fundamental water source, but the melting can also cause GLOFS – aka: 'mountain tsunamis' - killer flash floods that occur when glacial lakes suddenly burst.
By Julien Bouissou
LE MONDE/Worldcrunch
THIMPU -- The Kingdom of Bhutan, tucked between India and China in the foothills of the Himalaya mountain range, is paying the price for global industrialization. To the north of the country, a chain of Himalayan glaciers suffer increasingly unstable rates of melting and concerns about the long-term viability of the ice in the face of global warming.
Water flows from these melting glaciers until it breaks the natural ice dams that hold it in place. That, in turn, can result in devastating floods like the one that occurred in 1994, when a torrent of mud killed dozens of people in Bhutan and wiped out entire villages. Western scientists call this phenomenon a glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF. With 24 of its 2,674 glacial lakes considered unstable, Bhutan is preparing in the coming years for even deadlier “mountain tsunamis,” as the phenomenon is sometimes referred to.
Bhutan is one of the first countries in the world to make GLOF prevention a national priority. In 2005, the government received environmental protection funds financed in part by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The money was earmarked in part to help Bhutan drain water from the Thorthormi glacial lake and reinforce its natural dams. But at that high altitude, the work is difficult, dangerous and ultimately costly.
The air is too thin for helicopters to be of much use. Instead, a group of some 350 residents had to hike 10 days in order to set up a base camp at 5,000-meter elevation. From there, volunteer students, retired soldiers and traditionally-clothed villagers work knee-deep in glacial water, using the few tools they have to try and open a drain canal and build stone walls to reinforce the lake. Every year their efforts are interrupted by the arrival of winter.
“Thanks to satellite imagery, it’s possible to identify the most dangerous glaciers. But it’s impossible to say when or where a catastrophe will happen,” says Pradeep Mool, an engineer with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), based in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Researchers take various factors into account when assessing GLOF risk: topography, the likelihood of avalanches that could cause a lake to overflow, how solid a glacial lake’s natural dykes are and the volume of water the lake contains.
The causes of glacial floods are various and difficult to evaluate. And at high altitude, in extreme climate conditions, collecting such information can be extremely dangerous. Dowchu Dukpa, an engineer with Bhutan’s Ministry of the Environment, recalls how scientists struggled to measure water levels on Thorthormi Lake. “The winds were extremely strong, and almost capsized [the researchers’] boat,” he said.
Authorities have identified certain high-risk zones and, in an effort to save lives, prohibited construction in those areas. They now plan to set up an electronic alert system. Sensors placed in the glacial lakes will keep track of water levels. If the level quickly drops, a message will be relayed by SMS so that residents – alerted via cell phones – will know to seek shelter.
Water woes for 750 million?
Although these “tsunamis from above” may be the most immediate danger, they are not the only threat facing the people of Bhutan. As the Himalayan glaciers disappear, so too will the rivers on which the Kingdom depends. Water, after all, is the country’s most precious resource. Bhutan depends on it to irrigate its fields, which support thousands of farmers, and to feed its hydroelectric plants, which generate about 40% of the country’s wealth each year. Water is to Bhutan what oil is to Kuwait.
More at the linkMelting glaciers in the Himalayas put the small Kingdom of Bhutan at risk. Not only... more
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Bhutan's prime minister has issued a dire warning about the impact of Himalayan climate change, saying it could wreck the tiny kingdom's ambitious plans to be a world leader in hydropower.
The isolated, mountainous nation sandwiched between India and China is famed for pursuing "happiness" for its citizens instead of orthodox economic growth, with environmental protection central to its development model.
Bhutan, home to 700,000 people, is already a carbon-neutral electricity producer, with almost all of its power generated at plants that capture energy from the cascading streams that criss-cross its spectacular landscape.
But Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley told AFP the country was powerless to prevent changes caused by shifting weather patterns which threaten regional water supplies and plans to harness the energy of the Himalayan snowmelt.
"The glaciers are retreating very rapidly, some are even disappearing. The flow of water in our river system is fluctuating in ways that are very worrying," he said in an interview in his office in the capital Thimphu.
"In the summer they overflow their banks in a way that used to never happen in the past and in the winter they shrivel and almost dry up.
"The climate is changing, global warming is real and the impact on our hydrology is very severe."
The increase in meltwater caused by warmer summers has also led to the creation of lakes high in the mountains that threaten people in the valleys below.
The government is building an early warning system to alert authorities to any possible breach of the natural dams that hold back the water.
More at the linkBhutan's prime minister has issued a dire warning about the impact of Himalayan... more
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For millions living in Himalayan mountains the faster melting glaciers are posing a new danger - glacial lakes that may burst. From just a few thousand lakes in mid 1900s, the number has grown over 20,000 lakes in the Himalayan belt from Pakistan in the west to Burma in the East, says a new United Nations Development Fund documentary highlighting the danger of climate change to 1.3 billion people living in downstream valley.
"Some of these lakes pose danger to habitations as there is a risk of overflowing," said Andrew Schild, director of Nepal based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). About 15% of the lakes are said to be in the possible danger zone.
In 2005, Pareechu lake in China had burst in 2005 causing flash in the riverbed of Satluj in Himachal. At least 32 events of glacial lake overflows have been recorded in the Himalayan region causing huge lose to property and human life.
ICIMOD, a transnational body to monitor glaciers, says that lake Imja Toso in the Mount Everest region was non-existent in 1960s but now is one sq km in area and many lakes in eastern Himalayan region have increased by eight times over the past 40 years.
It is just tip of the iceberg as flow of water into glacial lakes is expected to increase further with half of the 32,000 glaciers expected to melt by end of this century. About 75% of glaciers in Indian part of Himalayan region are retreating at a faster than ever before, a recent Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) analysis said.
More at the linkFor millions living in Himalayan mountains the faster melting glaciers are posing a... more
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Climate change causes glacial lake to burst its banks seven times in three years.
The Cachet 2 glacial lake in Chile has drained and refilled seven times in three years.
CECS and Jonathan Leidich (PAEX), 2008.The people living beside the Colonia River in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia are under constant threat of a sudden catastrophic flood sweeping down from the mountains above them.
The region has experienced an unprecedented seven events called glacial-lake outburst floods since April 2008. Each time, Lake Cachet 2, which lies on the Colonia glacier, has drained its 200 million cubic metres of water in a matter of hours into the Colonia Lake and River, sending the water on to the river's confluence with Baker River, Chile's largest in terms of volume, and generating a wave as far as 25 kilometres upstream and 100 kilometres downstream to the Pacific Ocean.
"You can review the scientific literature and you will notice that these phenomena are known worldwide in the Himalayas, the Alps, but the difference here, and what is striking, is its recurrence," says Fabián Espinoza, regional director of the country's Bureau of Water Management.
The most recent flood was on 4 March this year. The water level in Colonia Lake rose 3.5 metres in just 28 hours and divided the region in two after cutting across the Austral Highway, the main north-south route in Aysén. The Baker River doubled in volume.
Glaciologist Gino Casassa of the Center for Scientific Studies (CECS) in Valdivia has studied the floods in collaboration with the Chilean Meteorological Office. After three years, he has a clear culprit in mind: the repeated opening and closing of a tunnel 8 kilometres beneath the Colonia glacier, connecting Lake Cachet 2 above the glacier and Colonia Lake below it1.
But why has this phenomenon occurred repeatedly over the past few years in Cachet 2? Casassa's answer is climate change: "The glaciers of Patagonia in general have receded and thinned greatly during the past decades," he says. "The lakes grow at the expense of the ice and generate situations in which there is a danger of draining. In the case of the Colonia glacier, this thinning has weakened the natural dam the glacier constitutes."
César Portocarrero, head of the Department of Glaciology and Water Resources at the National Water Authority of Peru, has studied this phenomenon elsewhere in the Andes. He agrees with Casassa. "We can affirm that there is a direct relation between climate change and the phenomena that have been occurring," he says. "The water generated by the melting of the glaciers circulates between the glacier and rock and serves as a lubricant for the shifting of the ice mass."
continuedClimate change causes glacial lake to burst its banks seven times in three years.... more
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Video extract from the film, 'Meltdown' about an expedition to highlight climate change in the Himalayas and the threat of glacial lake outburst floods. These are the effects of a warming world in concert with human behavior. People's lives are not just at stake
due to the effects of rapid melting glaciers, but the floods caused by glacial lakes whose force can wipe whole villages away.
Reality. All you have to do is look for yourself.Video extract from the film, 'Meltdown' about an expedition to highlight... more
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The WWF and UNEP, among others, are helping people adapt to climate change by reducing the risk of devastating glacial floods.
The emerald lakes that form at the snouts of glaciers are a beautiful sight, but rapidly melting glaciers can cause these lakes to breach their walls, inundating villages downstream. To reduce the threat, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) monitor and drain some of these lakes.
A partnership led by the WWF widened the outlet channel from Thorthormi Lake in Bhutan to lower the lake level by 86 cm this year, according to a WWF news release. The goal is to lower the water level five meters by 2012.
“The story of Thorthormi Lake is shaping up to be a story of successful adaptation to climate change,” said Tariq Aziz, Leader of WWF’s Living Himalayas Initiative in the press release. “However, it is also a story of the risks that climate change is building for communities and the costs and complexities of successful adaptation work.”
Glaciers constantly deposit rocks and sediment, which form ridges of loose material called moraines. A glacier with a stable position will build a terminal moraine at its bottom. When the glacier recedes, the terminal moraine holds back the lakes that develop from the melting ice. If the lakes grow too large they can breach the moraine, and flood valleys below.
That is what happened to Thorthormi Lake in 1994 — resulting in a flood that killed more than 20 people and destroyed crops, roads and hydroelectric power stations, according to the WWF. Since 2001 the lake, located 14,612 ft above sea level, has tripled in size, while its surrounding moraine dam has halved in height from erosion.
More than 100 new glacial lakes have formed in Bhutan since the last inventory was taken in 2001 by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.
Glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs as they are commonly referred to, are the target of a monitoring project run by the UNEP throughout the Himalayas and Hindu Kush range of Central Asia.
The project aims to assess the growth of glacial lakes from satellite data and install early warning systems to alert villagers to dangerous fluctuations in the water level.
The remoteness of these regions and the short research season make monitoring difficult and expensive – reasons to include funds for adaptation in any climate change treaty, according to the leader of WWF’s climate campaign.
“The speed of the changes, the dimensions of the new risks being faced by communities and the difficulties of securing lives and livelihoods against these threats makes sobering reading,” said Kim Carstensen in the WWF news release. “This gives some perspective to the calls for substantial funding for climate change adaptation in the developing world.”The WWF and UNEP, among others, are helping people adapt to climate change by reducing... more
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Nature reporter Anjali Nayar hiked for 21 days in Northern Bhutan to find out how this tiny Himalayan nation is dealing with rapidly melting glaciers. Read Anjali's full report here: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091021/full/4611042a.html.Nature reporter Anjali Nayar hiked for 21 days in Northern Bhutan to find out how this... more
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Lakes in Antarctica, concealed under miles of ice, require scientists to come up with creative ways to identify and analyze these hidden features. Now, researchers using space-based lasers on a NASA satellite have created the most comprehensive inventory of lakes that actively drain or fill under Antarctica's ice. They have revealed a continental plumbing system that is more dynamic than scientists thought.
"Even though Antarctica's ice sheet looks static, the more we watch it, the more we see there is activity going on there all the time," said Benjamin Smith of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study.
Unlike most lakes, Antarctic lakes are under pressure from the ice above. That pressure can push melt water from place to place like water in a squeezed balloon. The water moves under the ice in a broad, thin layer, but also through a linked cavity system. This flow can resupply other lakes near and far.
Understanding this plumbing is important, as it can lubricate glacier flow and send the ice speeding toward the ocean, where it can melt and contribute to sea level change. But figuring out what's happening beneath miles of ice is a challenge.
Researchers led by Smith analyzed 4.5 years of ice elevation data from NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation satellite (ICESat) to create the most complete inventory to date of changes in the Antarctic plumbing system. The team has mapped the location of 124 active lakes, estimated how fast they drain or fill, and described the implications for lake and ice-sheet dynamics in the Journal of Glaciology.
What Lies Beneath
For decades, researchers flew ice-penetrating radar on airplanes to "see" below the ice and infer the presence of lakes. In the 1990s, researchers began to combine airborne- and satellite-based data to observe lake locations on a continent-wide scale.
Scientists have since established the existence of about 280 "subglacial" lakes, most located below the East Antarctic ice sheet. But those measurements were a snapshot in time, and the question remained as to whether lakes are static or dynamic features. Were they simply sitting there collecting water?
In 2006 Helen Fricker, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., used satellite data to first observe subglacial lakes on the move. Working on a project to map the outline of Antarctica's land mass, Fricker needed to differentiate floating ice from grounded ice. This time it was laser technology that was up to the task. Fricker used ICESat's Geoscience Laser Altimeter System and measured how long it took a pulse of laser light to bounce of the ice and return to the satellite, from which she could infer ice elevation. Repeating the measurement over a course of time revealed elevation changes.
Fricker noticed, however, a sudden dramatic elevation change -- over land. It turned out this elevation change was caused by the filling and draining of some of Antarctica's biggest lakes.
"Sub-ice-sheet hydrology is a whole new field that opened up through the discovery of lakes filling and draining on relatively short timescales and involving large volumes of water," said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who has used ICESat data in other studies of Antarctica. "ICESat gets the credit for enabling that discovery."
end of excerptLakes in Antarctica, concealed under miles of ice, require scientists to come up with... more
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The latest research expedition to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field revealed that alpine glaciers in the Chilean and Argentine Andes are disappearing at much faster rates than previously anticipated by the scientific community.
A preliminary analysis by a team of scientists from NASA and Chile’s Valdivia-based Center of Scientific Studies (CECS), which commenced an expedition to the Ice Field in October 2008, sheds light on the alarming speed at which the glaciers are depleting.
The scientists discovered that the masses of ice in the Patagonia are melting in larger proportions and in much higher alpine zones than in any other part of the world, including Alaska and the Himalayas. Glacier ice accounts for around 75 percent of the world’s fresh water.
“The loss of ice mass in the higher zones is the really new phenomenon,” said Gino Casassa, a CECS glaciologist. “At least this is what we are seeing with the preliminary results which we have just received.”
Until recently, it was believed that glacial loss occurred from lower areas, and that snowfall on the higher sections of glaciers would compensate for loss of ice at lower altitudes.
“One hypothesis we put forward was that there could be a positive balance of ice in the high zones because of higher rates of snowfall in these areas,” said Casassa.
But with ice thinning high up and down low, too, loss in glacial mass in Patagonia is likely to be much greater than what has previously been calculated by scientists.
The new findings are also curious because they contradict some former studies.
For example, a previous study found that the Chilean glaciers Trinidad and Pio XI (the biggest glacier in the southern hemisphere outside of Antarctica) had advanced instead of receded, while the Perito Moreno glacier in the Los Glaciares National Park in southern Argentina had maintained a volume balance.
Between 1944 and 1986 glacial ice in the Southern Patagonia Ice Field was recorded as retreating at an average of 57 meters per year.
end of excerptThe latest research expedition to the Southern Patagonia Ice Field revealed that... more
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It's a little-known natural wonder along Baffin Island's rugged east coast, a spectacular, 110-km-long channel lined by towering cliffs that — despite its extreme remoteness — is a mecca for base-jumping enthusiasts from around the world.
But U.S. scientists who have reconstructed a cataclysmic glacial meltdown in prehistoric Canada say Nunavut's Sam Ford Fiord is also a sentinel of danger in the age of climate change, showing just how quickly the planet's massive coastal glaciers could disappear and send global sea levels surging.
Their study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, says the rapid melting of the fiord's colossal, kilometre-deep glacier about 9,500 years ago is proof that similar features found today in Greenland, Canada and Antarctica could be lost "in a geologic instant."
That's several decades or even a few centuries in ordinary time — but fast enough that the scientists, led by State University of New York geologist Jason Briner, are sounding an alarm about the present-day implications.
"A lot of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland are characteristic of the one we studied in the Canadian Arctic," Buffalo-based Briner states in a summary of the study, which presents evidence the Baffin Island glacier retreated at rates of up to 58 metres a year near the close of the last ice age.
"If modern glaciers do this for several decades, this would rapidly raise global sea level, intercepting coastal populations and requiring vast re-engineering of levees and other mitigation systems."
Many of the fiords with the world's largest coastal glaciers today are "strikingly analogous" to Sam Ford at the time of its "rapid deglaciation," Briner and two co-authors state in their Nature Geoscience article. "Thus tens to hundreds of kilometres of retreat of present outlet glaciers is possible in the coming centuries."
Researchers around the world are closely monitoring the conditions of ice shelves, glaciers and sea ice in the Earth's southern and northern polar regions.
Rising global temperatures, widely believed to have been fuelled by industrial-age carbon emissions, are generally blamed for accelerating glacial melts and opening long-frozen polar sea routes.
Last summer alone, Canadian scientists recorded the collapse of about one-quarter of the ancient, glacier-fed ice shelves along the north coast of Ellesmere Island.
end of excerpt.
How many warnings do we need?It's a little-known natural wonder along Baffin Island's rugged east coast,... more
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