Himalayan ice shrivels in global warming
When British climbing legend George Mallory took his iconic 1921
photo of Mount Everest’s north face, the mighty, river-shaped glacier
snaking under his feet seemed eternal.
Decades of pollution and global warming later, modern mountaineer
David Breashears has reshot the picture at the same spot — and proved an
alarming reality.
View of the Main Rongbuk Glacier, Northern Slope of Mount
Everest. AFP |
Instead of the powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice witnessed by
Mallory before he died on his conquest of Everest, the Main Rongbuk
Glacier today is shrunken and withered.
The frozen waves of ice pinnacles — many of them the size of office
buildings — are still there. But they are far fewer, lower and confined
to a narrow line.
Comparing precisely matched photographs, Breashears determined that
the Rongbuk had dropped some 320 feet (97 meters) in depth.
“The melt rate in this region of central and eastern Himalaya is
extreme and is devastating,” Breashears said Wednesday at New York’s
Asia Society, which is hosting the exhibition (http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/)
July 13 to August 15.
Amid bad-tempered political debates over the causes and reality of
global warming, Breashears speaks literally from the ground.
He went in the footsteps of three great early
mountaineer-photographers: Mallory, Canadian-born mapping pioneer Edward
Wheeler, and Italy’s Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and
20th centuries.
The result is then-and-now sets from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in
Pakistan showing seven glaciers in retreat — not only much diminished,
but in one case having dissolved into a lake.
“If this isn’t evidence of the glaciers in serious decline, I don’t
know what is,” the soft-spoken Breashears said.
The melting glaciers pose more than a threat to the “ultimate
harmony” Mallory once described finding in these beautiful peaks.
Himalayan glaciers are the world’s third largest reserve of ice after
the north and south poles, and their seasonal melt water is a crucial
source for Asia’s great rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong and
Yellow. Asia Society’s China expert Orville Schell described Nepal as “a
kind of a headquarters for the hydrology of the whole of Asia.”
As a result, rapid melting is triggering a “cascade of effects all
downstream, whether it’s animals, plants, rivers, agriculture, people,”
he said.
That interconnectedness also works the other way: fallout from vast
smog clouds over Asian population centers is dirtying the seemingly
remote glaciers, thereby hastening their destruction.
“This black carbon soot then turns the glaciers into kind of a solar
collector. Rather than reflecting heat back out of the atmosphere into
space, it’s absorbing it,” Schell said.
Addressing the problem requires data and that’s proving hard to get,
according to Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a top Indian glaciologist who attended
the “Rivers of Ice” opening.
Hasnain knows first hand about the difficulty of informed debate.
He said he was misquoted by a magazine claiming that Himalayan
glaciers could disappear by 2035, a terrifying but unfounded prospect
which caused uproar after slipping into a UN climate change report
earlier this year.
Hasnain particularly bemoans the complications of getting authorities
and scientists from India, Pakistan, China and Tibet to collaborate in
their often hostile border regions.
“We should know how much the glaciers are moving,” Hasnain said, “but
there is a problem of security. NASA wanted to put up some aerial
surveys but the government of India said you cannot.... India is so
skeptical and they’re not coming forward to share the data.”
Breashears said his photo-climbing expedition was dangerous and
exhausting as he searched for vantage points used more than half a
century ago.
One glacier near K2 required three climbs of 6,000 feet before he
found the same view enjoyed by Sella all those years earlier.
“We were totally in awe of the people that had been there before,”
Breashears said.
Future generations won’t have the same problem because Breashears
recorded each spot’s GPS coordinates.
The question is what will be left to photograph.
“You really do have a sense of something we once felt was sort of
triumphant in nature now being bested by man,” Schell said. “They’re
kind of on the run, literally moving slowly up the valley.”
AFP |