Vanishing Glaciers Of The Greater Himalaya - Photographic evidence

Anthropogenic global warming is melting the world's glaciers at increasing rates. This poses some grave dangers to the vast populations around the world who are dependent on glacial melt water feeding into the river systems as a supply of water for drinking and agriculture in the dry summer months. The glaciers of the Himalayas are mostly shrinking rapidly and these glaciers are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India and China. Some mountaineer photographers recently took current photos of many glaciers from the same spots that photos were taken many decades ago, showing the changes in the ice very clearly. Take a look.

Rivers of ice: Vanishing glaciers
Stunning images from high in the Himalayas - showing the extent by which many glaciers have shrunk in the past 80 years or so - have gone on display at the Royal Geographical Society in central London.
10 October 2011


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Here's another looming catastrophe caused by the melting of the glaciers as a result of anthropogenic global warming. These very dangerous glacial lakes are now forming in many of the glacier covered mountainous regions of the world including Switzerland and the Andes in South America. These glacial melt lakes will be causing a lot of disasters and deaths in this next decade and decades to come.

Disaster looms as Himalayas heat up
Guardian News & Media
October 15, 2011
(excerpts)

With the glaciers melting , there are fears of catastrophic floods for the villages below, writes Suzanne Goldenberg in Nepal.



But the Imja glacier lake is a high-altitude disaster in the making - one of dozens of danger zones emerging across the Himalayas as glaciers melt due to climate change. If the lake, at 5100 metres in Nepal's Everest region, breaks through its walls of glacial debris, known as moraine, it could release a deluge of water, mud and rock as far as 100 kilometres. This would swamp homes and fields with a layer of rubble up to 15 metres thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. But the question is when, rather than if. John Reynolds, a British engineer and expert on glacial lakes who has worked in Nepal, ...says there are other, more hazardous lakes elsewhere.

Mountain regions from the Andes to the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average under climate change. Ice turns to water; glaciers are slowly reduced to lakes.... There are other contenders for immediate action, with some 20,000 glacial lakes across the Himalayas, although many are concentrated in the Everest region. Bhutan has nearly 2700.

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

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

 

Granny says, "Dat's right - if dis global warmin' keeps up, we all gonna melt...

Canada could lose a fifth of its glaciers by 2100
Sun, Mar 10, 2013 - A fifth of Canada’s glaciers could be gone by the end of the century, a casualty of global warming that would drive a 3.5cm rise in sea levels, a study found on Thursday.

 

You have to be careful with the issue of glaciers. In some parts of the world glaciation is increasing. We have to consider at least two possibilities, a change in moisture conditions, or a genuine increase in temperature

 

It's actually both. Temperatures have definitely increased and the water vapor content of the atmosphere has gone up about 4% as a result of the increased temperatures. Worldwide, about 90% of the glaciers are shrinking and less than 10% show some growth due to increasing precipitation.


Long-term changes in glacier volume adapted from Cogley 2009



Percentage of shrinking and growing glaciers in 2008–2009, from the 2011 WGMS report



Cumulative mass balance curves for the mean of all glaciers and 30 'reference' glaciers (WGMS 2008 ).

 

Livefree, you have several issues here:

1) you say Anthropogenic global warming is melting the world's glaciers at increasing rates., while the "evidence" (and I'll address that next) you post only says that glaciers are melting. I submit since glaciers have been melting for the past 15,000 years that no power plant or suv need be involved........

2) you charts are notorious examples of people wanting to play fast and loose with numbers and graphs. There are no metric for the x Axis's (or for the pie). Without these metrics it is impossible for an informed reader to determine for himself whether the declines supposedly shown are significant, or tiny blips is an overall statistically static situation. That wouldn't be what this website you quote from would want now is it???

3) Finally you hint that the declining glaciers will cause million and millions to die from thirst. People do not drink ice they drink water....care to look at the precipitation rather that the location of an ice wall??

 

Fudd, you have a lot of issues here, most of which forum rules prevent me from addressing, but your main issue is your impenetrable ignorance. Why do you post BS when you obviously don't know anything about the subject? Perhaps it is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action again.

You "submit" a lot of ignorant BS, as usual. Glaciers have NOT "been melting for the past 15.000 years". The mountain top glaciers that we're talking about here have been present at about the same size they were a few centuries ago for the last 8000 years or so, with only minor retreats and advances in response to minor climate fluctuation. It is only in the last 150 years that major glacial decline has occurred and that decline is now accelerating.

Retreat of glaciers since 1850
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The retreat of glaciers since 1850 affects the availability of fresh water for irrigation and domestic use, mountain recreation, animals and plants that depend on glacier-melt, and in the longer term, the level of the oceans. Studied by glaciologists, the temporal coincidence of glacier retreat with the measured increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases is often cited as an evidentiary underpinning of global warming. Mid-latitude mountain ranges such as the Himalayas, Alps, Rocky Mountains, Cascade Range, and the southern Andes, as well as isolated tropical summits such as Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, are showing some of the largest proportionate glacial losses.[1] In general glaciers continuing to melt and retreat.[2]

The Little Ice Age was a period from about 1550 to 1850 when the world experienced relatively cooler temperatures compared to the present. Subsequently, until about 1940, glaciers around the world retreated as the climate warmed substantially. Glacial retreat slowed and even reversed temporarily, in many cases, between 1950 and 1980 as a slight global cooling occurred. Since 1980, a significant global warming has led to glacier retreat becoming increasingly rapid and ubiquitous, so much so that some glaciers have disappeared altogether, and the existence of a great number of the remaining glaciers of the world is threatened. In locations such as the Andes of South America and Himalayas in Asia, the demise of glaciers in these regions will have potential impact on water supplies. The retreat of mountain glaciers, notably in western North America, Asia, the Alps, Indonesia and Africa, and tropical and subtropical regions of South America, has been used to provide qualitative evidence for the rise in global temperatures since the late 19th century.[3] The recent substantial retreat and an acceleration of the rate of retreat since 1995 of a number of key outlet glaciers of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, may foreshadow a rise in sea level, having a potentially dramatic effect on coastal regions worldwide.

LOLOLOLOL.....that's so totally clueless, it is rather funny. The first graph is from a published paper and passed peer review. The second graph is a pie chart and is also from a published report from the World Glacier Monitoring Service. The third graph is also from a published report from the WGMS and shows the cumulative changes in the total mass of ice in the world's glaciers. Your objections seem to be based only on your own ignorance of science.

Why on Earth would you refer to yourself as "an informed reader"??? You show a lot of evidence of being either completely uninformed or massively misinformed.

Another demonstration of your complete ignorance of this topic. People do indeed "drink the ice" in a very real way. The ice added to mountain glaciers in the winter is what feeds water into the rivers in the summer time when there is no rain. Billions of people are directly dependent on the water storage provided by the mountain glaciers for the water they drink, wash with and use to irrigate their crops, plus that water is often used to generate hydro-electricity.

Retreat of glaciers since 1850
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Impacts of glacier retreat

The continued retreat of glaciers will have a number of different quantitative impacts. In areas that are heavily dependent on water runoff from glaciers that melt during the warmer summer months, a continuation of the current retreat will eventually deplete the glacial ice and substantially reduce or eliminate runoff. A reduction in runoff will affect the ability to irrigate crops and will reduce summer stream flows necessary to keep dams and reservoirs replenished. This situation is particularly acute for irrigation in South America, where numerous artificial lakes are filled almost exclusively by glacial melt.[105] Central Asian countries have also been historically dependent on the seasonal glacier melt water for irrigation and drinking supplies. In Norway, the Alps, and the Pacific Northwest of North America, glacier runoff is important for hydropower.

Some of this retreat has resulted in efforts to slow down the loss of glaciers in the Alps. To retard melting of the glaciers used by certain Austrian ski resorts, portions of the Stubai and Pitztal Glaciers were partially covered with plastic.[106] In Switzerland plastic sheeting is also used to reduce the melt of glacial ice used as ski slopes.[107] While covering glaciers with plastic sheeting may prove advantageous to ski resorts on a small scale, this practice is not expected to be economically practical on a much larger scale.

Many species of freshwater and saltwater plants and animals are dependent on glacier-fed waters to ensure the cold water habitat to which they have adapted. Some species of freshwater fish need cold water to survive and to reproduce, and this is especially true with salmon and cutthroat trout. Reduced glacial runoff can lead to insufficient stream flow to allow these species to thrive. Alterations to the ocean currents, due to increased freshwater inputs from glacier melt, and the potential alterations to thermohaline circulation of the World Ocean, may impact existing fisheries upon which humans depend as well.[108]

The potential for major sea level rise depends mostly on a significant melting of the polar ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, as this is where the vast majority of glacial ice is located. If all the ice on the polar ice caps were to melt away, the oceans of the world would rise an estimated 70 m (230 ft). Although previously it was thought that the polar ice caps were not contributing heavily to sea level rise (IPCC 2007), recent studies have confirmed that both Antarctica and Greenland are contributing 0.5 millimetres (0.020 in) a year each to global sea level rise.[109][110][111] The fact that the IPCC estimates did not include rapid ice sheet decay into their sea level predictions makes it difficult to ascertain a plausible estimate for sea level rise but recent studies find that the minimum sea level rise will be around 0.8 metres (2.6 ft) by 2100.[112]

 

"People do not drink ice they drink water"...I read that and it was palm meets face time, we're debating with science illiterates, glacier melt water is grade school science...Alps, Himalayas, Rockies, Andes literally billions of people depend on a steady supply glacial melt water...

 

How's about Photographic or any other evidence that Glaciers Of The Greater Himalaya, or for that matter, any other glaciers will NOT do what glaciers have been doing for all time of their existence, - that they will not build up again.

Believers in vacuum fluctuations and othger dimensions are so entertaining . They scream, - Look the snow is melting; we will never be able to ski here again.

Hello, it is a spring time. Snow is always melting in spring here.

Then believers in evolution are calculating a mean temperature of a thermodynamic cycle ... so we observe monkeys trying to type a poem. What is a probability that a million monkey typing indefinetly can end up with typing a poem? What does the statistical mathematics say?










Monkeys do not type. They just crap all over typewriters, I mean keyboards; as we observe.
So much for mathematics.

 

LOLOLOLOL.....just how fast do you 'think' glaciers vanish and then "build up again"???

Do you not realize how ignorant you are about this? Try learning something about a subject before you post moronic BS like this.

Most of these mountain glaciers that are vanishing have been present, in substantially the same size as they were a century or so ago, since the end of the last period of glaciation 11,000 years ago, with only minor shrinkage and growth over the centuries in response to natural climate fluctuation. It takes a very, very long time for accumulated snowfall to compact into huge ice masses hundreds of feet thick, miles wide, and many miles long. Melting of the ice can occur much faster.

Moreover, the glaciers are vanishing because the temperatures are rising due to AGW and they will continue rising, so the glaciers are not even going to be able to "build up again" because it is now too hot in these mountainous regions for the ice to persist long enough to form a glacier and the temperatures are soon going to get even higher as global warming continues.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.....wow!....that is some really confused and meaningless gibberish....do you comprehend that there is something called a 'topic' for this thread.....in what strange universe does that nonsensical drivel you just spewed have anything at all to do with the vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas???

 

You know this is one of the issues that originally made me so skeptical of man made climate change.

For many years it was claimed that the rate of glacier loss in the Himalaya's had drastic implications for the models that predicted the rate of change for our climate.

Then they figured out that it was the soot from increased coal burning in China, that was coating the glaciers causing them to melt because of the black film absorbing sunlight melting the glaciers.

 

i think even a monkey would be able to know the difference between snow and glacial ice, but you apparently not...

 

And whats that soot made from?

Oh yeah...carbon

 

You've been fed some misinformation. Although carbon particles from industrial pollution are having some effect on the ice in some places, they do not coat the ice like a black film or whatever you're imagining. The measured increase in temperatures in the areas where the glaciers are located is the primary cause of the disappearance of the glaciers.

 

Your thinking path is well known, - it is quote out of the context and divert from the text.How's about Photographic or any other evidence that Glaciers Of The Greater Himalaya, or for that matter, any other glaciers will NOT do what glaciers have been doing for all time of their existence, - that they will not build up again.
Look at the text one more time:

I like the depth of your thinking process expressed in your reply to my post above. It is better than any photographic evidence of intellectual abilities of overwhelming majorities of the scientific community driven only to overwelm no matter what, no matter how . The reality is: Monkeys do not type. They just crap all over keyboards; as we observe.









Monkeys do not type. They just crap all over typewriters, I mean keyboards; as we observe.
So much for mathematics.[/QUOTE]

 

So, no photographic evidence for the past 11,000 years? It was expected.
How is about past 100 years? Hint - it does exist, all one has to do is to search away from AGW propaganda sites. There are some serious people there.

 

No, the Himalaya's glacier loss has occured at 5 times the rate of any other glaicer loss. You don't know what you are talking about.

 

LOL. Says the guy who can't even spell glacier. Most of the glaciers all around the planet are melting at accelerated rates.

Unprecedented Glacier Melting in the Andes Blamed On Climate Change
ScienceDaily
Jan. 22, 2013
(excerpts)
Glaciers in the tropical Andes have been retreating at increasing rate since the 1970s, scientists write in the most comprehensive review to date of Andean glacier observations. The researchers blame the melting on rising temperatures as the region has warmed about 0.7°C over the past 50 years (1950-1994). This unprecedented retreat could affect water supply to Andean populations in the near future. These conclusions are published January 22 in The Cryosphere, an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). The international team of scientists -- uniting researchers from Europe, South America and the US -- shows in the new paper that, since the 1970s, glaciers in tropical Andes have been melting at a rate unprecedented in the past 300 years. Globally, glaciers have been retreating at a moderate pace as the planet warmed after the peak of the Little Ice Age, a cold period lasting from the 16th to the mid-19th century. Over the past few decades, however, the rate of melting has increased steeply in the tropical Andes. Glaciers in the mountain range have shrunk by an average of 30-50% since the 1970s, according to Antoine Rabatel, researcher at the Laboratory for Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics in Grenoble, France, and lead author of the study.

Glaciers are retreating everywhere in the tropical Andes, but the melting is more pronounced for small glaciers at low altitudes, the authors report. Glaciers at altitudes below 5,400 metres have lost about 1.35 metres in ice thickness (an average of 1.2 metres of water equivalent [see note]) per year since the late 1970s, twice the rate of the larger, high-altitude glaciers. "Because the maximum thickness of these small, low-altitude glaciers rarely exceeds 40 metres, with such an annual loss they will probably completely disappear within the coming decades," says Rabatel. The researchers further report that the amount of rainfall in the region did not change much over the past few decades and, therefore, cannot account for changes in glacier retreat. Instead, climate change is to blame for the melting: regional temperatures increased an average of 0.15°C per decade over the 1950-1994 period.

 

http://www.treehugger.com/natural-s...-melting-caused-by-aerosols-black-carbon.html

 

That's a good article, pimp, but the conclusions regarding apportionment of causes are not shared by all of the other climate scientists. I'll get to that later. First though, I'm trying to figure out what your point is in making these posts, and also where you're coming from in the first place on this subject. Our conversation started with this post of yours, at the top of this page, where you said: "You know this is one of the issues that originally made me so skeptical of man made climate change."

So....you start off by saying you're "skeptical of man made climate change" (i.e. - you deny anthropogenic global warming), and then you go on to say that it is mankind's industrial pollution in the form of aerosols and black carbon that are causing most of the observed melting of the world's glaciers. The article you just posted states that:
"Black carbon is a problem because it 1) absorbs sunlight, warming the atmosphere, and 2) when it falls on the snow it changes the albedo of the surface, allowing it to absorb more sunlight and accelerates melting."
So manmade aerosols and black carbon are warming the atmosphere and melting the glaciers, according to you and your own sources, but you are somehow still "skeptical of man made climate change" - and yet you seem to feel no cognitive dissonance at all. That's really amazing.

You go on to claim in your next post: "No, the Himalaya's glacier loss has occured at 5 times the rate of any other glaicer loss. You don't know what you are talking about.", but I notice that you couldn't back that claim up with any evidence. I told you that my understanding was that most of the world's glaciers are melting at an increasingly rapid and similar pace and the primary cause is the increase in temperatures, with the soot amplifying the effect of the warming.

Now, as to how much of the melting of the glaciers and other ice is due to the measured increase in temperatures produced by the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 levels and how much is due to the affect of the black carbon particles coming to rest on the ice and snow, is not really settled yet. You posted a three year old report on some research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory but there are many other reports on research from other groups, some more recent, that disagree with some of their conclusions. Here's a report from about six months ago from the US National Research Council.

Many Himalayan Glaciers Melting at Alarming Rates
Environmental New Network
14 September 2012
(excerpts)
Washington, DC – Glaciers in the east and central regions of the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region are retreating at an alarming rate according to a new report released this week by the National Research Council. While the glaciers in the western HKH appear to be stable and possibly growing, glaciers over the rest of the HKH are melting at rates similar to the collapsing glaciers in much of the rest of the world. Warming is particularly acute at higher elevations of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, which over the past fifty years have warmed at three times the global average. The report cautions that the causes for glacier melt are complex but are driven in large part by rising temperatures. Aerosols such as black carbon and desert dust are also significant contributors to warming in the region.

Cutting black carbon in addition to other short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) can reduce the current rate of global warming by almost half, the rate of warming in the Arctic by two-thirds, and the HKH region by half for the next 30 or more years while avoiding up to 4.7 million premature deaths each year from outdoor air pollution and up to 1.6 million a year from indoor pollution. Black carbon is targeted by the new Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, along with HFC and methane. There are currently 27 members of the Coalition including the G8 countries, the European Commission, World Bank, and the United Nations Environment Programme, which will host the Secretariat. “The Climate and Clean Air Coalition may be the only way to reduce climate impacts in the near term, and is a critical complement to the primary battle to reduce emissions of CO2,” said Zaelke. “We need to take fast-action.”

The NRC Report can be found here.


So pimp, please tell me what you think your point is???... and why do you deny "man made climate changes" and then post evidence confirming "man made climate changes"??? Do you have a point or are you just very confused and/or bamboozled by the fossil fuel industry propaganda???

 

No overwhelming majority has been formed yet? Speculations, speculations...
I just read canals and cavities filled with water is discovered inside glaciers. Nobody knew about them befire. Actually it is not to much known about glaciers, but there is a lot of apportionments.

Only overwhelming majorities of the scientific community do not know that all processes in nature are cyclical, what is melting then will be frezing, what is evaporating will be condensing, As CO2 goes into it is absorbed from the air, and soon there is no trace of the CO2 which went up a year ago in the air. Don't they teach it in the 4th grade?

 

Well, for many years I had questions about the science of the entire earth's climate, and wheter we could accurately predcict the impact man was having on it. To this day I still have serious questions about how much weight we should give to the models for our rate of change.

For me the Berkeley Earth Surface Temerature study changed that when it addressed issues of sun spots, and volcanic activity, as well as questions to the sample size of information being analyzed. The way the amount of carbon we have produced lines up with the temperature increases is quite compelling, and no longer do I question whether man made climate change exists, or whether we are the main factor in the shift today.

I'll just try being honest here, and see where it gets me. The studies I am referancing citing the Himalayan glacier melt occuring at 5 times the rate of other glacial loss are from five or six years ago. Didn't have any luck finding them.

I see what the problem is here now. I am apparently out of date on the glacier melt in the Himalayan's.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weat.../2010-01-20-un-panel-himalayan-glaciers_N.htm

Well my point was that the Himalayan glacier melt should be discounted due to soot, but considering the estimated rate of loss is not what I thought it was, that seems to be besides the point now.

 

Hey, thanks for answering my questions with a good, thoughtful reply. I appreciate your honesty.

If you'd care to see some more evidence of the Himalayan glacial melting, check out the 4 minute video on this site:

Rivers of ice: Vanishing glaciers
BBC

 

If Himalayan glacial is melting, then what is freezing?

 

Your question makes no sense. Not too surprisingly.