Glacial Watch

What the experts say:

There’s no doubt it’s getting warmer
By Joydeep Gupta

The Hindu Kush Himalayas – sometimes called the water tower of Asia – provide water to 10 major river basins in China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan and a number of countries in central Asia. Learn More.

 

Glaciers and guesswork
By Isabel Hilton

The “third pole” is hugely vulnerable to the effects of glacier retreat -- but the science is scarce. Isabel Hilton speaks with Andreas Schild, a specialist in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region.Learn More.

 

Global Warming Melting Glaciers, Shrinking Harvests in China and India
By Lester Brown

The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. Learn More.

 

Understanding glacier changes
By Kenneth Hewitt

Reports about the melting – and advancing – of Himalayan glaciers have sparked heated debate. In the first section of a three-part article,Kenneth Hewitt warns against oversimplification.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.Learn More.

 

Glaciergate was a blunder, but it's the sceptics who dissemble
By Robin McKie, The Observer

It was a strange moment that linked the fates of some of the world's poorest farmers to the interests of an increasingly powerful set of western lobby groups. Last week, UN climate researchers admitted they had grossly overestimated the chances that the Himalayas' glaciers would soon disappear as a result of global warming.Learn More.

 

The real Himalayan scandal
By Isabel Hilton, China Dialogue

What's really shocking about research into the glaciers of the Himalayas is how little there has been.The pace and pattern of glacier retreat is urgent, and needs to be understood through science, not dismissed by ignorant sceptics, chinadialogue editor Isabel Hilton wrote in a commentary for The Guardian.Learn More.

 

Tibetan Plateau in Peril
By Michael Zhao, Far Eastern Economic Review Online

Climate change is usually discussed as tomorrow’s problem. But the world’s most elevated land, the Tibetan Plateau, is already feeling the effects of warming temperatures, melting glaciers and permafrost, and degrading pastoral ecosystems. Put simply, the Tibetan Plateau is melting, endangering much of Asia and the world’s population.Learn More.

 

China´s Magic Melting Mountain
By Orville Schell, Condé Nast Magazine

Glaciologist Thompson insists that the science speaks for itself: “A glacier is a wonderful archive. You can take it to any government, or the U.S. Senate, and no one has yet come up with any political agenda that a glacier might have except that the climate on the planet is changing.”Learn More.

 

Why are the Himalayan glaciers melting?
By BBC

The BBC's Chris Morris travels to the main source of the Ganges river to find out why the glaciers are melting.As the first light of dawn lit up the snow-covered mountain peaks, we trekked through a barren landscape 4,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, heading for the Gangotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges.Learn More.

 

Glacier Environments- Hazards and Disaster
By ICIMOD

Global trends in natural disasters for the last two decades show that both the number of disasters and the number of affected people are increasing, leading to major environmental and socio-economic costs.Policy makers and practitioners need to better understand local contexts and needs for improved disaster risk reduction activities.Learn More.

 

Warm Ocean Waters are Speeding Greenland Glacier Melt
By Lynn Englum, WWF Climate Blog

According to newly published letter from NASA and university researchers in Nature Geoscience,at the lower reaches of west Greenland glaciers--where the glaciers terminate in ocean waters--the submerged portions of the glaciers are melting 100 times faster than the above water areas of the glaciers where warm air temperatures drive the melting.Learn More.

 

Melting Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau
By Claudia Delpero, WWF

If I compare this land to what it used to be in the 1960s, it is difficult for me to recognize it,” recalls Qi Mei Duo Jie, a 71-year-old nomadic herder from Yanshiping in China’s central-western Qinghai Province.Glaciers are melting, temperatures are rising and rainy seasons have become unpredictable.Learn More.