Rock, ice, debris and water flowing at high speeds swept away hydroelectric projects and people in its path on Sunday, before it mellowed around 100 kilometres downstream.

Mujeem Khan, a daily wage labourer earning 500 rupees a day ($7), was working near a tunnel at the Tapovan hydropower project, where 150 of his colleagues got trapped. He says he survived narrowly. “Luckily, I was a little higher up the slope when the flood hit,” he told Climate Home News.

Khan heard what sounded like a massive blast, turned around and saw water and debris dragging away members of his extended family. “My brother and other relatives were working right where the flood hit. I saw them being washed away into the tunnel.” He had little hope of their being found alive.

As of 12 noon local time Tuesday, the Uttarakhand state government reported that 31 dead bodies had been recovered, of whom 29 had been identified. More than 48 hours after the incident, 175 people were unaccounted for.

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While scientists and experts are still working to pinpoint what triggered the flood, the working hypothesis is that due to a rock slide, a large chunk of glacier broke at an altitude over 5,500 metres above sea level.

The ice and rock fell into a glacial lake, causing the banks to burst and water to gush down the steep and narrow gorges of the upper Himalayas. The number and area of glacial lakes has increased in the mountain range due to climate change.

Floodwaters smashed into the Rishi Ganga hydroelectric project at around 3,700 metres above sea level and washed it away entirely. According to the chief minister of Uttarakhand Trivendra Rawat, at least 35 people working at the project are missing. Concrete and debris from the Rishi Ganga project were then carried downstream and smashed into the under-construction 520MW Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower project, causing massive damage.

The disaster was made more likely by climate change, according to Mohammed Farooq Azam, an assistant professor of glaciology and hydrology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. “Yes, warming temperatures are making events like avalanches, ice fall and landslides more frequent. Erratic weather patterns like increased snowfall and rainfall play a role as do warmer winters,” Azam said.

Avalanches are rare in February in the upper reaches of the Himalayas as the snow and ice remain frozen due to low temperatures. This year, however, has been warmer than normal and in January Uttarakhand – and the rest of India – saw its highest average temperature in 60 years.

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AP Dimri, a professor at the School of Environmental Science at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said the higher reaches of the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average which has led to rapid melting of glaciers. That has, in turn, caused the formation of a large number of glacial lakes. “These lakes also become reservoirs of ice and moraine debris. With an increase in this phenomenon, the breach of glacier lakes poses a severe threat to communities living downstream,” Dimri, who is from Uttarakhand, said.

The damage was aggravated by debris from development projects including the hydropower dams and highways being carried downstream.

In 2013, the calamitous combination of climate change and haphazard development in Uttarakhand led to the deaths of over 6,000 people in flash floods caused by heavy rainfall during the Indian monsoon.

Experts such as Ravi Chopra, director of the People’s Science Institute in Uttarakhand, had been warning about the risk of such development projects even before 2013. “But the government doesn’t listen when it doesn’t suit them… when we say that project should not be built or that the size should be reduced,” Chopra said.

Chopra argued that the government should pay heed to the views of experts and fix responsibility for this disaster. “Companies and officers who are found to be at fault should be personally held responsible and punished. Only then can we hope for some change,” he said.

Kabir Agarwal is an independent journalist from India who writes on climate change, business and the economy. He has contributed to the Times of India, Caravan magazine, Al Jazeera and most recently worked as a national reporter at The Wire – India’s leading independent news website. In 2018, he was awarded the Red Ink Award for excellence in journalism. 

Twitter – @kabira_tweeting

This article was amended to reflect analysis showing that a rock slide, not an avalanche, was the likely trigger of the disaster.

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Many fish, corals and other marine life are suffering in ever warmer waters, with more frequent underwater heatwaves, acidification caused by man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a decline in levels of oxygen, the world’s leading climate scientists said.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a special report about the oceans and the cryosphere – the world’s frozen regions. It was compiled by more than 100 authors from 36 nations.

The report is the most detailed look at the impact of climate change ranging from melting glaciers on the world’s highest mountains to the depths of the oceans that cover 71% of the Earth’s surface.

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“The open sea, the Arctic, the Antarctic and the high mountains may seem far away to many people,” said Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC. “But we depend on them and are influenced by them directly and indirectly in many ways.” Melting Himalayan glaciers, for instance, provide water to grow crops or generate hydropower before flowing into the oceans.

The report points to alarming signs of an accelerating melt of Antarctica that could herald an irreversible thaw from the world’s biggest store of frozen ice, ahead of Greenland.

Even so, sea level rise could be limited to 43cm by 2100, and around a metre by 2300, if the world sharply cuts greenhouse gas emissions in line with a goal set by almost 200 nations in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming to 2C above pre-industrial times, it said.

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But a future with no meaningful action and rising greenhouse gas emissions could push up sea levels by 84cm by 2100, about 10cm higher than estimated in the most recent IPCC global assessment in 2014 because of Antarctica’s quickening melt.

On that track, seas could rise by anywhere between 2.3 and 5.4 metres by 2300, it said. That would redraw maps of the world, make entire low-lying nations in the Pacific Ocean uninhabitable and swamp coasts from Bangladesh to Miami.

Lee said that there were worrying signs that the world was losing the race against climate change. “We need to take immediate and drastic action to cut emissions right now,” he said.

“Humanity is exacting a terrible toll on the ocean,” Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg and Palau president Tommy Remengesau Jr. wrote in CNN on Monday. “Global warming, combined with the negative impacts of numerous other human activities, is devastating our ocean, with alarming declines in fish stocks, the death of our reefs, and sea level rise that could displace hundreds of millions of people.”

Authors said those different futures for rising seas highlighted stark choices now.

“Although many of the messages may seem depressing … there are actual, positive choices that can be made to limit the worst impacts of climate change,” said Michael Meredith, of the British Antarctic Survey.

Nerilie Abram, of Australian National University, also said: “We see changes in all of these areas, from the tops of high mountain to the depths of the oceans and the polar region …We see two very different futures ahead of us.”

The report was published two days after leaders failed to match UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’ call for nations to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 at a summit in New York.

Global CO2 output continues to rise. Guterres said such immediate action was needed to get on track to limit warming to 1.5C, the toughest goal of the Paris Agreement. Global average temperatures are already up about 1C.

The UN asked for climate plans. Major economies failed to answer

Delegates to the IPCC said Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s top oil producer, had repeatedly sought changes at the Monaco meeting, partly to weaken links to an IPCC report in 2018 that examined ways to achieve the 1.5C goal.

Largely at Saudi insistence, Wednesday’s text, for instance, merely said it “follows” the 1.5C report and another about climate change and land issued this year. Many other delegates had favoured the word “complements” to underscore that the reports are part of a family of scientific studies.

Delegates said the Saudis pushed to water down any wording that would link this report to the IPCC’s 1.5 degrees report. In Katowice, the COP only “noted” the 1.5C report, under pressure from Saudis, Americans etc, stopping short of “welcoming” it. 

Saudi Arabia seemed to worry that the Santiago COP may “welcome” this new report. If so, it could implicitly endorse the findings in the 1.5C report if they were strongly connected in the text, so they wanted to loosen any links.

Some authors said wrangling over wording ended up helping because authors tightened the scientific findings.

Martin Sommerkorn, an author with the WWF conservation group, said that “the report ended up stronger because of a defence of the science.”

Delegates said the wrangling contributed to delay the meeting, with an all-night session lasting into Tuesday, from a scheduled finish on Monday.

They also said that the US delegation did not stand in the way of the science, even though US president Donald Trump plans to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

Climate science on 1.5C erased at UN talks as US and Saudis step in

Among other findings, the report said the maximum catch of fish in the oceans, already falling because of factors including over-fishing and pollution as well as warming waters, would fall by between 20 and 24% this century unless governments take strong action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

And fish stocks would be driven polewards or to the depths as the waters warm, perhaps causing conflicts over dwindling resources.

The report said extreme high tides or storm surges that historically happened only once a century could become at least annual events by 2100, exacerbated by rising sea levels. And a melt of permafrost could release methane and undermine infrastructure in mountains or polar regions.

“The impacts of human-made carbon emissions on our oceans are on a much larger scale and happening way faster than predicted,” said Taehyun Park, global climate political advisor with Greenpeace East Asia.

The post Dying oceans rising faster than predicted, UN warns in stark report appeared first on Climate Home News.

The approvals – some with conditions – came at the 14th meeting of the GCF board, held from October 12 to 14 in Songdo, South Korea.

But a big project in South Asia was effectively kept on hold. There was considerable acrimony at the board meeting when Dinesh Sharma, representing the government of India, objected to the USD 37 million project meant to reduce the risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) in northern Pakistan.

The project is supposed to be carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The status of the affected region was the big problem. Many of the activities under the project are planned in Gilgit-Baltistan, an area under the administrative control of Pakistan but claimed by both India and Pakistan.

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Some parts are under the administrative control of China and are also claimed by India.

Sharma, a Special Secretary in India’s Ministry of Finance, said, “The same portion (Gilgit-Baltistan) comes under the administrative control of different countries. Not just India, it’s Pakistan, it’s the other countries also.”

Talking about the countries that are under threat from GLOFs in the Himalayas, Sharma objected to the exclusion of India from the list in the project proposal. “They are all listed in the appraisal note. Nepal, Bhutan, China. Only India for some reason is not listed.”

Sharma stressed that his objections were not political but technical. According to him, the proposal had assumed there would be no GLOF during the five years when construction under the project was going on, and this was a faulty assumption.

There have been a number of GLOFs in the region in the last few years.

https://twitter.com/OmairTAhmad/status/790812319064264704

After two days of debate and closed-door negotiations, a complicated decision was reached. The project was approved but an independent technical assessment to study its feasibility will be carried out. The report of this assessment will be submitted to the board and the money for the project will be given only if the board approves the report.

Many members of the GCF board expressed their unhappiness over the controversy. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a member from an African country said, “The meeting was effectively hijacked due to the political tension between India and Pakistan. This is not healthy. It may affect any proposal submitted by India in future.”

Another proposal that led to much debate was for a USD 378 million project for Sustainable Energy Financing Facilities, to be carried out by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in 13 countries – Albania, Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, Jordan, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Serbia, Tajikistan and Tunisia.

The problem was that of the 13, only eight governments had provided mandatory no-objection letters. It was finally decided that only those eight countries would be funded.

At the meeting, the board appointed Howard Bamsey of Australia as the GCF Executive Director for the next four years.

Eight more organisations were accredited by the board, so that they can approach the GCF for funds. The GCF is now the principal conduit for funding projects to combat climate change – much of its money comes from industrialised countries, and it has so far approved 16 projects, all in developing countries.

The fund now has over USD 10 billion, though that is far short of the promise by industrialised countries to pay USD 100 billion a year from 2020.

This article first appeared on The Third Pole

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This presents a problem in the long term for more than 2 million people who rely on glacial meltwater supply in the dry season, and immediate danger in the short term for thousands who might live below precarious glacial lakes.

Glaciers are in retreat as the world warms − a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in response to the increasing combustion of fossil fuels.

They are dwindling almost everywhere in the Andean chain, in Greenland, in Alaska and Canada, the Himalayas, across the entire mass of Central Asia,and everywhere in the tropics.

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But a study in The Cryosphere, the journal of the European Geosciences Union, is one of the first to examine in detail precisely what this retreat could mean for the human communities in Bolivia, home to one-fifth of the world’s tropical glaciers.

Researchers from two British universities and a Bolivian colleague examined NASA satellite images of the region and found that the area of the Bolivia Cordillera Oriental normally covered by glaciers fell from 530 square kilometres in 1986 to about 300 sq km in 2014 − a shrinkage of more than two-fifths.

They then turned to the glacial lakes − bodies of water left behind as a glacier retreats. Some are in natural dips in the bedrock; some are accidentally dammed behind walls of glacial debris.

All such lakes are precarious: rockfalls, earthquakes and avalanches can breach them or tip water from them to create a dangerous downstream flow.

“We mapped hundreds of lakes,” says Simon Cook, senior lecturer in physical geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, who led the study.

“Some lakes are very small and pose little risk. Others are very large, but there’s little or no possibility that they would drain catastrophically. Others are large enough to create a big flood, and sit beneath steep slopes or steep glaciers, and could be dangerous.”

Studies such as these are a demonstration that climate change is happening, and that science can deliver practical help to communities in the path of potential disaster or economic stress.

“Most glaciers will be gone or much diminished  by the end of the century – so where will the water come from in the dry season?”

Civil engineers, geographers, conservationists and hydraulic engineers are no longer simply warning about the hazards of climate change. They have begun toidentify the communities most vulnerable to flooding, the hazards to local biodiversity as forests and grasslands begin to feel the heat, and the cities most at risk from routine coastal flooding as sea levels rise. and the US states that must start planning now for future power disruption as a consequence of drought.

Meltwater matters to mountain communities. It supplies the drive for hydroelectric power and it delivers clean drinking water to the cities and irrigation for crops in the dry season.

Reservoirs at risk

Through the year, the 2.3 million people in the Bolivian cities of La Paz and El Alto get 15% of their water from glacial supplies; in the dry season, this figure doubles. Glacial meltwater also keeps regional rivers and lakes topped up. So as the glaciers retreat and the body of surviving ice dwindles, some of these reservoirs, too, are at risk.

The researchers pinpointed 25 lakes as potentially dangerous. Even the smallest, were it to drain completely, would tip a peak flow of 600 cubic metres of water a second down the hillside. The largest could discharge 125,000 cubic metres − 50 times the volume of an Olympic swimming pool − every second.

A glacial lake outburst in 2009 killed farm animals, destroyed crops and washed away a road, leaving villagers isolated for months.

Dr Cook says: “We considered that a lake was dangerous if there were settlements or infrastructure down-valley from the lake, and if the slopes and glaciers around the lake were very steep, meaning that they could shed ice or snow or rock into the lake, which would cause it to overtop and generate a flood – a bit like jumping into a swimming pool, but on a much bigger scale.

“Most glaciers will be gone or much diminished by the end of the century – so where will the water come from in the dry season?

“Big cities like La Paz are partially dependent on meltwater from glaciers. But little is known about potential water resource stress in more remote areas. Much more work needs to be done on this issue.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

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Grand Coulee Wall. A basalt rockface in the western United States shows the marks of ice age floods across the epochs (Flickr/ Peter Prehn)

By Alex Pashley

The Earth will skip a whole glacial cycle due to human-caused global warming, new research suggests.

Vast ice sheets won’t return to continental Europe and North America for 100,000 years, according to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Berlin on Wednesday.

The last ice age ended 15,000 years ago, with glaciers having carved out today’s landscapes.

It ushered in the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which some researchers argue has given way to the Anthropocene – a phase characterised by human impacts on the environment.

The Anthropocene: Are humans causing a new geological epoch?

The next ice age was due in 50,000 years’ time. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are already sufficient to put it off another 50,000 years, the study published in journal Nature said.

If more than 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide are cumulatively released into the atmosphere, which the world is on track to reach by mid-century, the next ice age could be delayed another 50,000-year interval.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png; Berger and Loutre, 2002; Berner 2006; Royer et al. 2004, and others).

“Due to the extremely long life-time of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, past and future emissions have a significant impact on the timing of the next glacial inception,” said co-author Ricarda Winkelmann.

Between the start of the Industrial Revolution and 2011, the world emitted about 531 Gt of carbon, according to the UN climate science panel, the IPCC.

Low radiation from summer sun, which is consistent with the stirrings of an ice age, prompted the scientists to study glacial cycles and changing levels of atmospheric CO2.

“The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented,” said lead author, Andrey Ganopolski. “It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”

The post Human-caused warming postpones next ice age by 50,000 years appeared first on Climate Home News.

Gyldenlove Glacier, Greenland (Pic: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

By Tim Radford

Water may be flowing from the Greenland ice cap and into the sea more quickly than anybody expected.

It doesn’t mean that global warming has got conspicuously worse: rather, researchers have had to revise their understanding of the intricate physiology of the northern hemisphere’s biggest icecap.

There is enough ice and snow packed deep over 1.7 million square kilometres of Greenland that, were it all to melt, would cause a rise in global sea levels of about six metres.

Since the icecap is melting as the atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rise, and global temperatures rise with them, as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels, the rate at which summer meltwater gets into the oceans becomes vital to climate calculations.

The latest rethink begins not with the pools of water that collect on the surface each summer, or the acceleration of the glaciers as they make their way to the ocean, but with a granular layer of snow just below the surface, called firn.

This is old snow in the process of being compacted into glacier ice, and covers the island in a layer up to 80 metres thick.

Until now, researchers have understood this firn layer as a kind of sponge that absorbs meltwater and holds it, thus limiting the flow of melting ice into the sea.

But a new study in Nature Climate Change by researchers from the US, Denmark and the University of Zurich suggests that earlier assumptions may be wrong.

“Meltwater couldn’t penetrate vertically through the solid ice layer, and instead drained along the ice sheet surface towards the ocean”

However, the findings are not definitive, and they deliver a picture more of science in progress, rather than any long-term conclusion.

To work out how much meltwater might be stored within the pores of the firn, the scientists set up camp in 2012, 2013 and 2015 on the ice cap to use radar and to drill a series of holes 20 metres deep into the porous firn layer − also choosing sites where samples had been taken 20 years ago.

The conclusion was that meltwater is being released faster than anticipated.

Horst Machguth, a research associate in the Department of Geography at theUniversity of Zurich, says: “Basically, our research shows that the firn reacts fast to a changing climate. Its ability to limit mass loss of the ice sheet by retaining meltwater could be smaller than previously assumed.”

Storage capacity

An extreme melt in 2012 left a sheet of solid ice, several metres thick, on top of the porous firn, in some places.

“In subsequent years, meltwater couldn’t penetrate vertically through the solid ice layer, and instead drained along the ice sheet surface towards the ocean,” says William Colgan, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering at York University in Toronto, Canada.

“It overturned the idea that the firn can behave as a nearly bottomless sponge to absorb meltwater. Instead, we found that the meltwater storage capacity in the firn could be capped off relatively quickly.”

The implication is that sea level rise from Greenland’s icecap is liable to be higher than predicted. Just how much higher is unknown, and the next step is to confirm the latest findings and incorporate the research so far into climate models.

Since detailed research in a hostile environment is always a challenge, any clear answer may take a few years more to emerge.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Glacier Grey in Chila is one of many experiencing increased rates of melting (Pic: Pixabay)

By Alex Kirby

The world’s glaciers are melting fast − probably faster than at any time in recorded history, according to new research.

Measurements show several hundred glaciers are losing between half and one metre of thickness every year − at least twice the average loss for the 20th century − and remote monitoring shows this rate of melting is far more widespread.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years.

Drawing on reports from its observers in more than 30 countries, it has published in the Journal of Glaciology a comprehensive analysis of global glacier changes.

Pictorial sources

The study compares observations of the first decade of this century with all available earlier data from field, airborne and satellite observations, and with reconstructions from pictorial and written sources.

Dr Michael Zemp, director of WGMS and lead author of the study, says the current annual loss of 0.5-1 metre of ice thickness observed on “a few hundred glaciers” through direct measurement is two to three times more than the average for the last century.

“However, these results are qualitatively confirmed from field and satellite-based observations for tens of thousands of glaciers around the world,” he adds.

The WGMS compiles the results of worldwide glacier observations in annual calls-for-data.

The current database contains more than 5,000 measurements of glacier volume and mass changes since 1850, and more than 42,000 front variations from observations and reconstructions stretching back to the 16th century.

“Intense ice loss of the last two decades has resulted in a strong imbalance of glaciers
in many regions of the world”

Glaciers provide drinking water for millions of people, as well as irrigating crops and providing hydropower. When they melt, they also make a measurable contribution to sea level rise.

The researchers say the current rate of glacier melt is without precedent at the global scale − at least for the time period observed, and probably also for recorded history, as reconstructions from written and illustrated documents attest.

Long-term retreat

The study also shows that the long-term retreat of glacier tongues is a global phenomenon. Intermittent re-advance periods at regional and decadal scales are normally restricted to a smaller sample of glaciers and have not come close to achieving the Little Ice Age maximum positions reached between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Glacier tongues in Norway, for example, have retreated by some kilometres from their maximum extents in the 19th century. The intermittent re-advances of the 1990s were restricted to glaciers in coastal areas, and to a few hundred metres.

The study shows that the intense ice loss of the last two decades has resulted in what it calls “a strong imbalance of glaciers in many regions of the world”. And Dr Zemp warns: “These glaciers will suffer further ice loss, even if climate remains stable.”

He told Climate News Network: “Due to the strong ice loss over the past few decades, many glaciers are too big under current climatic conditions. They simply have not had enough time to react to the climatic changes of the past.

“So they will have to retreat further until they are in balance with climatic conditions again. In the European Alps, many glaciers would lose about 50% of their present surface area without further climate change.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Glacier melt hits record levels, report Zurich-based monitors appeared first on Climate Home News.

Annapurna South in central Nepal, which stands at 7,219 m altitude (Flickr/ C C Chang)

By Nivedita Khandekar in Delhi

Studying ice loss in the vast, inhospitable region of the Himalayas can be a very tricky business as most glaciers are found above 12,000 feet.

While much of the data is derived from satellite surveys, reliable field data is also vital − but skill shortages mean that only four of the approximately 9,500 glaciers spread across the Indian section of the Himalayas are being studied in detail.

Gathering field data involves a combination of skills that include high-altitude mountaineering. Weather restricts such work to about four months of the year, and there is also the constant danger of avalanches.

The mighty Gangotri glacier, in the far northwest of the country, is one of the four glaciers monitored in detail by field researchers.

Rapidly disintegrating

Recent studies indicate that the Gangotri, one of the Himalayas’ largest glaciers and a primary source of the Ganges, is rapidly disintegrating. Nearly 30 kilometres long and between 0.5 and 2.5km wide, it is at present retreating by between 12 and 13 metres a year.

To analyse the impacts of climate change, and to predict what will happen in the future in glacial regions, it is necessary to carry out what glaciologists refer to as surveys of mass balance – analysing the relative difference between the accumulation and melting of ice and snow on a glacier over a given period.

Collecting and interpreting data – from satellite imagery and from field surveys – is highly specialised. And Indian institutions say a big knowledge gap has developed, with only limited field data being collected and a lack of trained personnel available to interpret the results of remote sensing and other data.

A determined effort is now being made by several institutions to produce more trained glaciologists.

The Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology is undertaking a project with the Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation to train young scientists in glaciology as part of a Himalayan climate change and adaptation programme.

The Indian Space Research Organisation, which has been collecting satellite data on glaciers for many years, has a fully-fledged climate change department that is becoming more involved in monitoring glacier size and mass balance data.

The Divecha Centre for Climate Change, part of the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, is also combining studies of glaciology and climate change.

The generally accepted view is that the majority of glaciers in the Himalayas – an area often referred to as “The Third Pole”, due to its vast ice mass – are in retreat.

Reliable conclusions

Yet in some areas, such as the Karakoram Range in the west of the Himalayas, satellite data indicates that glaciers are advancing.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional organisation based in Nepal and specialising in the Himalayas/Hindu Kush region, says much more field work is needed to draw reliable conclusions about the extent of glacial loss across the Himalayas.

It points to data collected in Nepal and to studies in China that clearly show a decrease in glacial area. At the same time, fragmentation means that more smaller glaciers are being created.

The world should be concerned about glacial melt in the Himalayas, ICIMOD says, because “there is evidence of changing climatic patterns leading to changing water flow patterns that could have serious impacts”.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

The post Too few scientists track loss of Himalayan glaciers appeared first on Climate Home News.

Alaska’s Columbia glacier is almost 20 kms shorter than it was in 1980 (Wikimedia Commons/ US Fish and Wildlife Service)

By Tim Radford

The glaciers of Alaska are melting and retreating: the chief cause is climate change and the loss of ice is unlikely to slow, according to a new study by US scientists.

They calculate that the frozen rivers of the Pacific coast of America’s northernmost state are melting fast enough to cover the whole of Alaska with 30 cms of water every seven years.

Since Alaska is enormous – it covers 1.5 million square kilometres and is the size of California, Texas and Montana put together – this adds up to a significant contribution to sea level rise.

“The Alaska region has long been considered a primary player in the global sea level budget, but the exact details of the drivers and mechanisms of Alaska glacier change have been stubbornly elusive,” said Chris Larsen, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and lead author of a study in Geophysical Research Letters.

Taxonomy of change

Scientists from the University of Alaska and the US Geological Survey analysed studies of 116 glaciers in the Alaska region over a 19-year-period to estimate the rate at which ice melted and icebergs calved.

They used airborne lidar remote sensing technology and other techniques, historical data and a global glacier inventory to establish a kind of taxonomy of glacier change.

Report: Fossil fuels just pushed CO2 levels to a 3 million-year high

The Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound had retreated more than 19 kilometres because of iceberg calving and had thinned by 450 meters in height since 1980. But, unexpectedly, tidewater glaciers – those that end in the ocean – seemed to make comparatively little contribution to sea level rise.

“Instead we show that glaciers ending on land are losing mass exceptionally fast, overshadowing mass changes due to iceberg calving, and making climate-related melting the primary control on mountain glacier mass loss,” Dr Larsen said.

Big contributor

He and his colleagues calculated that Alaska is losing ice at the rate of 75 billion metric tons a year. Such research is just one more piece of careful cross-checking in the great mosaic of climate research: another systematic confirmation that overall, glaciers are not losing ice in response to some natural cycle of change of the kind that occasionally confuses the picture for climate science.

The agency at work is largely global warming as a response to the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels.

Mountain glaciers represent only 1% of the total ice on the planet: the other 99% is found in Greenland – which is melting fast – and in the great frozen continent of Antarctica, where ice mass is being lost at an increasing rate.

Report: Arctic ice melt sends Alaskan temperatures soaring by 7C

But although the mountains of the temperate and tropic zones bear only a tiny percentage of the planet’s ice, their melting accounts for almost a third of the sea level rise currently measured by oceanographers, and this melting will go on to become a big contributor to the sea levels later this century.

Across the border in Canada, glaciologists have warned that the country will lose a huge volume of flowing ice, and while one team has confirmed that air pollution rather than global warming long ago began to strip Europe’s Alps of their glaciers, in general mountain peaks are warming faster than the valleys and plains below them.

Geophysicists and glaciologists have established that the glaciers of the tropical Andes are at risk, and in the Himalayan mountain chain glaciers seem to be in inexorable retreat with consequences that could be devastating for the many millions in the Indian subcontinent and in China who rely on seasonal meltwater for agriculture.

Study: Alaska wildfires spiral in warming climate

Glaciers are by definition hard to study – they are high, cold and in dangerous terrain – and such research is inevitably incomplete: the scientists for instance excluded glaciers smaller than three square kilometres. But together these small patches of flowing ice account for 16% of Alaska’s glaciated landscape. The 116 glaciers in the survey together added up to only 41% of the state’s glaciated area.

But the pattern established by the Fairbanks team suggests that melting will accelerate with climate change. “Rates of loss from Alaska are unlikely to decline, since surface melt is the predominant driver, and summer temperatures are expected to increase,” said Dr Larsen.

“There is a lot of momentum in the system, and Alaska will continue to be a major driver of sea level change in the upcoming decades.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network 

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Athabasca glacier in British Columbia, Canada (Pic: Alex Dawson/Flickr)

By Tim Radford

As the world warms, many of the great frozen rivers of Canada will not just retreat, but could vanish altogether.

New research suggests that maritime glaciers in the far northwest might survive, but more than two-thirds of Canada’s existing glaciers in British Columbia and Alberta could be lost altogether by 2100.

Garry Clarke, a glaciologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, says: “Soon our mountains could look like those in Colorado or California, and you don’t see much ice in those landscapes.”

The consequences for the forests, grasslands, animals and communities that depend on glacial meltwater could be serious. The disappearance of the glaciers will also create problems for Canada’s hydroelectric industry, for agriculture and grazing, for the mining industry, for the salmon fishery, and for tourism.

Professor Clarke and his colleagues report in Nature Geoscience that they devised a model – a high-resolution computer simulation – of the glaciers of western Canada that explicitly mimicked glacial flow. Then they tested it with a range of scenarios for climate change, driven by human combustion of fossil fuels and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the last two centuries.

Vast landmass

There are more than 17,000 glaciers in British Columbia and Alberta, covering more than 26,000 square kilometres of the two provinces, and holding an estimated 2,980 cubic kilometres of ice. This puts western Canada as more glaciated than the Himalayas (which have less than 23,000 sq kms of glacier): the entire continent of South America has only 31,000 sq kms of glacier.

The researchers found that maritime glaciers in the northwest would endure, in a diminished state. But overall, the volume of the glaciers in western Canada would shrink by 70%, give or take 10%.

Right now glaciers, most of them between 100 and 200 metres thick, are thinning at a rate of about a metre a year. The peak flow of meltwater would most likely occur between 2020 and 2040. Thereafter, the rivers would be in decline.

Potential sea level rise as a consequence of this, the scientists say, would be “modest” at around 6mm, but the consequences for that part of Canada would be substantial.

The Columbia River, which flows from the interior to the Pacific coast of Washington and Oregon, yields the largest hydroelectric production of any river in North America. And the impact on freshwater ecosystems could be considerable.

“These glaciers act as a thermostat for freshwater systems,” said Professor Clarke. “Once the glaciers are gone, the streams will be a lot warmer and this will hugely change freshwater habitat. We could see some unpleasant surprises in terms of salmon productivity.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network 

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Pic: Flickr / blmiers2

By Alex Kirby

There’s much more of an iceberg under the water than above it. And, it turns out, there’s much more happening beneath the surface to Antarctic ice shelves than anyone had guessed.

A team of researchers from British, Dutch and US universities has found that more ice leaves Antarctica by melting from the underside of submerged ice shelves than was previously thought, accounting for as much as 90% of the ice lost in some areas.

Iceberg production and melting results in 2,800 cubic kilometres of ice leaving the Antarctic ice sheet annually. Most is replaced by snow falling on the continent, but any imbalance means a change in global sea level.

Scientists have believed for decades that the main way this loss occurred was through iceberg calving, as huge chunks of ice broke off at the edge of a glacier.

But the team, led by academics at the University of Bristol, UK, with colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the University of California, has used satellite and climate model data to prove that the melting of the shelves’ undersides has as large an impact as iceberg calving for Antarctica as a whole, and for some areas is far more important.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, are crucial to understanding how the ice sheet interacts with the rest of the climate system, particularly the ocean.

During the last decade the Antarctic ice sheet has been losing an increasing amount of volume. The annual turnover of ice equals 700 times the UK’s yearly domestic water usage of just four cubic kilometres a year.

The researchers found that, for some ice shelves, melting of their underbellies could account for as much as 90% of the mass loss, while for others it was only 10%.

“Understanding how the largest ice mass on the planet loses ice to the oceans is one of the most fundamental things we need to know for Antarctica.”

Ice shelves which are thinning already were identified as losing most of their mass from this type of melting, a finding which will help to show which shelves may be particularly vulnerable to changes in future ocean warming.

The scientists used satellite and airborne data to accurately measure the flow of the ice, its elevation and its thickness. These observations were combined with the output of a climate model for snowfall over the ice sheet.

The team then worked out how much ice was leaving Antarctica, either by entering the ocean from the underside of the ice shelves or by calving off the glaciers’ edges. By combining these totals they could estimate the mass loss of ice from the continent.

Professor Jonathan Bamber, from the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, said: “Understanding how the largest ice mass on the planet loses ice to the oceans is one of the most fundamental things we need to know for Antarctica. Until recently, we assumed that most of the ice was lost through icebergs.

“Now we realise that melting underneath the ice shelves by the ocean is equally important and, for some places, far more important. This knowledge is crucial for understanding how the ice sheets interact now, and in the future, with changes in climate.”

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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Swiss Alps. (Pic: babasteve)

By Alex Kirby

The Alps of central Europe began melting many years before there was any influence from climate change.

Scientists now say it was not rising temperatures that triggered the melt, but pollution.

It wasn’t warming that attacked the glaciers, they say in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was soot from industry, steam locomotives and domestic fires.

Glaciologists have for years been puzzled by the sudden start in the middle of the 19th century of the retreat of the Alpine glaciers, which number around 4,000.

They had survived in good condition from the 13th century throughout the fairly cool 500-year period called the Little Ice Age. They reached their greatest extent in the mid-1800s, about double what they are now.

But even though it remained cool the glaciers suddenly began shrinking, leading scientists to believe that the Little Ice Age had ended around 1850.

Average global temperatures, though, did not rise significantly – until the end of the 19th century.

In fact, Alpine climate records – among the most extensive and reliable in the world  – suggest that the glaciers should have continued to grow for another 50 years or more, until about 1910.

Soot

The scientists acknowledge that other parts of the world may also have been affected, but point out that the decline was well documented only in the Alps.

However, soot is also a big concern in the Himalayas, at high altitudes in some regions bigger than temperature rises. The burgeoning economies of China and India contribute huge amounts.

“Something gnawed on the glaciers that climate records don’t capture,” said Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a member of the team that identified black carbon, or soot, as the cause.

“A strong decline in winter snowfall was often assumed to be the culprit. But from all that we know, no such decline occurred.”

Because darker surfaces absorb more heat than lighter, more reflective ones, if enough soot is deposited on snow and ice it can accelerate melting.

Records suggest that by the mid-19th century the air in some Alpine valleys was laden with pollution. “Housewives in Innsbruck refrained from drying laundry outdoors,” says Kaser.

Gone by 2100?

Scientists used to think soot was unlikely to have been carried high enough to start the glaciers melting, but they now appear to have been mistaken.

When Kaser’s team looked at ice cores previously drilled at two sites high in the western Alps – the Colle Gnifetti glacier saddle 4,455 m up on Monte Rosa near the Swiss–Italian border, and the Fiescherhorn glacier at 3,900 m in the Bernese Alps – they found that in around 1860 layers of glacial ice started to contain large amounts of soot.

The team measured the effect the soot would have had on glaciers at the time in terms of  equivalent changes in air temperature. They found that the melting effect of black carbon provided a good explanation of the observed glacier retreat.

Andreas Vieli, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland (who was not involved in the study) said: “…[T]his study offers a very elegant and plausible explanation for the glacier conundrum. It appears that in central Europe soot prematurely stopped the Little Ice Age.”

Only after around 1970, when air quality began to improve, did accelerated climate warming become the dominant driver of Alpine glacier retreat, Kaser says.

He says that if glaciers in the region continue to melt at the rate seen during the past 30 years, there is a risk that nearly all of them will vanish before the end of the century.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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Glacial mass changes are considered among the most sensitive indicators of climate change (Pic: edubucher)

By Sophie Yeo

Large stretches of ice along the Greenland and Antarctic coastlines are at risk of “catastrophic breakup”, new research has warned.

Using a new model to anticipate the calving of glaciers – the process where large chunks of ice break off and float into the sea to create icebergs, exacerbating the problem of rising sea levels.

Scientists from the University of Michigan have pointed to the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers in Antarctica and the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland as being particularly at risk of catastrophic disintegration.

“If this starts to happen and we’re right, we might be closer to the higher end of sea level rise estimates for the next 100 years,” said Jeremy Bassis, , the first author of the paper, which appears in Nature Geoscience.

The vulnerability of these two ice stretches is exacerbated by a number of factors, including the fact that they are bordered by deep and unobstructed ocean rather than fjords or other waterways.

This means the calved icebergs can float away into open water, creating room for more to break off from the main ice sheet. The Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland is already retreating rapidly.

The model establishes a critical threshold at which glaciers are likely to start breaking up, although Bassis suspects that climate change can cause icebergs to form before this threshold is reached.

Melted water pools, which occur more frequently as the planet warms, cut through the surface of the glacier, which destabilizes it and increases the likelihood of it calving.

This is believed to have played a role in the rapid disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, which crumbled over about six weeks in 2002.

Calving accounts for about half the mass lost from ice sheets, and can have severe impact on sea level rise. Despite this, it is not reflected in the model of how climate change affects ice sheets, says Bassis.

“Fifty percent of the total mass loss from the ice sheets, we just don’t understand. We essentially haven’t been able to predict that, so events such as rapid disintegration aren’t included in those estimates,” Bassis said.

“Our new model helps us understand the different parameters, and that gives us hope that we can better predict how things will change in the future.”

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Greenhouse gas emissions up to the present day have triggered an irreversible warming that will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years, scientists have warned.

A study, published in Environmental Research Letters, found that the world could already be committed to a sea level rise of 1.1 metres by the year 3000.

It is one of the first times a studied has considered the impacts of glaciers, ice caps, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and the expansion of oceans as they warm.

It is still difficult for scientists to model how the polar ice sheets might react to climate change. Accounting for approximately 200,000 individual glaciers worldwide can also be complicated.

It remains difficult for scientists to model how the Antarctic ice sheet will react to climate change and how this could impact sea levels (Source: Mark 217/Creative Commons)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report predicted sea-levels would rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. This assessment did not include the impact of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets.

In 2009, however, two years after the IPCC report, scientists at the climate change congress in Copenhagen said changes to these ice sheets could put sea level rises at a metre or more by 2100.

The latest study found that if the world was to follow the high emissions scenario adopted by the IPPC an 8.6 metre sea-level rise could be expected in the next thousand years.

In the other scenarios (B1 and A1B), sea-level rises of 2.1 and 4.1 metres were seen respectively.

In all their models researchers found the Greenland ice sheet to be responsible for more than half of the sea level rise, with an expansion of warming oceans as the second highest contributor.

It found the contributions of glacier melt to be small.

“Ice sheets are very slow components in the climate system; they respond on time scales of thousands of years,” said Professor Philippe Huybrechts, co-author of the study.

“Together with the long life-time of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this inertia is the real poison on the climate system: anything we do now that changes the forcing in the climate system will necessarily have long consequences for the ice sheets and sea level.”

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The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off.

Predictions of how melting ice sheets in Greenland could contribute to sea level rise have ranged between zero and six feet by 2100.

However, the most recent research into the region found, that while the ice sheets there are melting 30% faster than at the turn of the century, the worst case predictions for sea level rise look more unlikely.

Despite this the researchers reinforced that the implications of glacier melt – both in Greenland and worldwide – on rising sea levels – and climate change – could be dramatic.

The Rio Conventions Calendar is published annually by Entico in partnership with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

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A new study has discovered that Greenland’s glaciers are flowing about 30% faster than at the turn of the century but their contribution to sea level rise is much below the worst case scenario.

Greenland's glaciers are moving towards the ocean faster but affecting sea level rise less than thought. (Source: Flickr/Basheertome)

The researchers from Washington and Ohio State universities, examined 200 small glaciers in Greenland. They found some glaciers nearer the coast could travel as much as 7 miles a year compared to 30-300 feet a year for inland glaciers.

The faster a glacier moves the more water it deposits in the oceans. Understanding the rate that glaciers and ice sheets melt and break-off or “calve” into the oceans is key to predicting future sea level rise.

According to the paper published in the journal Science, the glaciers averaged an increase in speed of 30% between 2000-2011.

Previous predictions of sea level rise have ranged from zero to as high as six feet by 2100.

Twila Moon, lead author of the paper said it was difficult to see the worst case scenario unfolding based on current evidence.

Even modest sea level increases can contaminate fresh water supplies and the frequency of storm surges.

Read the full study here (subscription required).

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Pakistan has launched its first climate change adaptation project aimed at tackling the threats communities face from bursting glacier lakes in the country’s northern mountains.

With Northern Pakistan being home to 5,218 glaciers and 2420 glacial lakes – 52 of which have been classified as potentially dangerous – the two year pilot project is the first of its kind in the country to help the vulnerable better understand and respond to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).

Speaking at the event launch, Jawed Ali Khan, Director General of Environment and Climate Change at Pakistan’s Ministry of Environment said GLOF is like a “mountain tsunami in the making”.

Northern Pakistan is home to 5,218 glaciers and 2420 glacial lakes (© bongo vongo/Creative Commons)

GLOFs take place when dams containing a glacial lake – a lake which has formed as a glacier has receded – fails.

Failure of such a lake can happen for several reasons including erosion, a build up of water pressure, an avalanche of rock or snow, an earthquake, volcanic eruptions under the ice or if large portions of a glacier break off and displaces the lake.

Studies of glacier lakes, in both Pakistan and other countries – particularly Nepal – have found many of the glacier lakes growing at an alarming rate and often unstable.

The $4.1 million project in Pakistan, managed by Ministry of National Disaster Management in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, will focus on two sites: Bagrot Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan and Drongagh Valley Chitral in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of the country.

The adaptation project aims to help vulnerable communities protect against the threat of glacier lake outburst floods (© bongo vongo/Creative Commons)

The sites are part of the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region – which is the largest area in the world covered by glaciers and has around 15,000 glaciers across eight countries from Afghanistan to Myanmar and includes both Pakistan and Nepal.

A recent study examining 3D satellite images of glaciers in the Karakoram range – on the border of India, China and Pakistan – found they have actually gained mass.

The project members, however, said glaciers in Pakistan are receding at a rate on average of almost 40 to 60 metres per decade and post a threat to the region and the 1.3 billion people who live in the basins of the nine river systems covered by the HKH glaciers.

Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, Advisor on Climate Affairs stressed that global warming trends and challenges including avalanches, landslides and GLOF threats are greater in Pakistan than the global average.

“Climate change poses risks as well as opportunities to a region like Pakistan, rich in biodiversity,” he said. “Pakistan is the lowest emitter of greenhouse gases but the worst sufferer, which justifies the urgent need to implement the GLOF project.”

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A group of Asian glaciers have gained mass but remain a global anomaly, according to new research published in Nature Geoscience.

Glacier in the Karakoram region have been shown to be growing, bucking the global trend. (Source: Flickr/*_*)

Glaciers in the Karakoram range, north of the Himalaya, were previously thought to be growing or in a state of equilibrium, gaining as much water from precipitation as they were losing from melting.

According to UNEP, ice sheets and glaciers account for 68.7% of the world’s freshwater. The US Geological Survey predicts that if all of this melted, sea level would rise by 70m.

Globally, the world’s glaciers are shrinking.

The new study of the Karakoram used French satellite measurements to predict changes in the glaciers’ mass balance (the difference between precipitation gains and losses to melting).

It found that the overall change was a gain of 0.11m a year. The margin for error in the data is ±0.22m a year. This means there is a small chance that the glacier shrank by 0.11m in a year but could also have grown by as much as 0.33m a year.

The results mean the Karakorum glaciers are currently making no contribution to rising sea levels.

The paper calls for field studies of the remote area to improve the accuracy of the satellite data.

Wetter, cooler weather

The authors also point to climate data from the region that shows maximum summer temperatures have decreased between 1961 and 2000. At the same time winter precipitation increased resulting in glacial growth.

Many use the science behind the anomaly in the Himalaya as evidence that climate change is not occurring. However, the overwhelming evidence at the poles, far outweighs the contribution from the Asian glaciers.

Accelerated melting is near universal at the poles where the latitude, altitude and prevailing climate is different from the Himalaya and other mountain ranges straddling the borders of China, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Antarctica alone contains 70% of all the world’s ice.

Contact the author of this story @rtcc_john or jp@rtcc.org

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A climate sceptic website has offered $500 to anyone who can ‘debunk’ a UN film on glacier melt in the Himalayas.

The film, ‘Himayalan Meltdown’ is a joint project between the UNDP, Arrowhead Films, and Discovery Channel Asia.

It will be given a special screening at the US State Department today (Monday) ahead of a panel event to discuss the impacts of glacier melt in the Himalayas.

However, the event has received  attention from the website junkscience.com.

It is offering $500 to anyone who will attend the event and ask a question on camera “that aims to debunk the notion that global warming is causing the Himalayan glaciers to disappear’.

Glacier melt in the Himalayas has remained a controversial issue since 2007 when the region found itself at the heart of what was called ‘glaciergate’.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted glaciers would disappear by 2035. In 2010 IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri admitted the report was flawed, but said glaciers were melting at a faster pace than previous studies indicated.

This position was backed up last month by new research published by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development – the body that tracks glacier retreat across the region.

The research release coincided with Mountain Day at the UN Climate Summit in Durban last month and found widespread glacial retreat in all areas of the Himalayas.

The UNDP film examines how the shrinking Himalayan glaciers and rising sea levels are affecting people in China, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.

Speaking at the film’s premiere last June, Helen Clarke, head of the UNDP said: “We will see the impact on the Asian river valleys flowing from the Himalayas – the mudslides from the shifting monsoon rains, the changing mountain terrain, and new areas of drought – all posing considerable risk to human life and to the well-being of more than a billion people.

VIDEO: The 45-minute film was first released in June 2011, at the Asia Society in Washington and New York, and will be shown to the US State Department audience for the first time today.

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