Nepal will mark the rapid fusion of a crucial glacier with “funeral” next week while scientists warn that climate change threatens thousands of other glacial caps around the world.
Buddhist monks, scientists, government representatives and community personalities will participate in a ceremony on Monday at the Yala glacier, one of the most studied and measured glacial bodies of the Hindu region of Himalayas, which is now considered in danger.
So -called glacier funerals have taken place in Iceland, Mexico and Switzerland in recent years, but the service on Monday is the first in the Hindu region of the Himalayas of Kush, which holds the third largest volume of ice on earth after the two polar geographic areas.
The transformation of Yala from “white glacier” into “rocky with debris” was “incredibly sad”, said Sharad Prasad Joshi, an international cryosphere analyst at the Integrated Mountain Development and the National Correspondent of Nepal for the World Glacier Surveillance Service.
The ceremony comes as scientists warn against rapid acceleration of the merger of terrestrial glaciers, with enormous implications. The melting of glaciers leads to sea level increases and intensifies climate change, due to the loss of ice which reflects rather than absorbing sunlight. The floods and risks of subsequent drought can also increase.
Fabien Mausssion, an expert in changes in past glaciers and their future projections, estimated that more than 1,000 glaciers disappear worldwide, including many without name and not widely studied.
“We know that the glaciers are melting. But they don't only become smaller and smaller, they are starting to disappear,” said Miriam Jackson, a crying scientist, who worked on the Yala glacier.
Last year, Venezuela became one of the first countries in modern history to lose all its glaciers. Some modeling suggest that German glaciers will disappear in a few years.
Cymene Howe, an anthropologist at Rice University who was part of the team that organized the first glacier funeral in Iceland, said: “They are dying … It is a fundamental loss.”
Glaciers are generally considered to be “dead” when the ice becomes so slim when they found that they no longer move under their own weight.
While Yala should disappear entirely around 2040, there was a question of whether the glacier was “already dead,” said Jackson, who is a researcher for the Norwegian government and the Nordic and Nordic director of the international Cryosphere Climate (ICCI) initiative.
“You might say that Yala is no longer really a glacier. He has so much narrowed that he no longer deforms under his own weight … You can see pieces of ice there that are roughly stagnant and melted,” she said.
Most scientists focus on loss of mass of ice rather than the number of glaciers fading, given that as a melted glacier, it can indeed become several different bodies of ice.
This year's search revealed that around 273 billion tonnes of ice has disappeared each year on average since 2000 – the equivalent to 30 years of water consumption by the world's population.
Between a quarter and 80% of the mass of glaciers should be lost by the end of the century, depending on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the elevation of global temperature.
“Part of this loss is already locked up (due to existing climate change), but if we quickly reduce programs, we can save many others (glaciers),” said James Kirkham, chief scientific advisor of ICCI.
Shyam Saran, the former special envoy of India for climate change, said that the “rhythm and the scale of deglaciation and loss of snow” occurring through the Himalayas “that I saw with my own eyes, is really breathtaking”.
“This has major implications for the prosperity of this region, and not only food, water and energy security, but also national security,” he warned.
This year, snow levels in the Himalayas of Kush Himalayas have reached a 23 -year -old hollow, threatening the water supply of two billion people.
Joshi said that Yala's retirement and other glaciers have “huge implications”, in particular by triggering an increase in additional temperature, due to the loss of reflectivity and “water implications, livelihoods and more downstream”.
Yala had played a crucial role in the training of researchers in a region where “our ability to monitor and therefore predict and act on what is happening” to glaciers far behind other regions of the world, added Joshi. He visited Yala 26 times and formed a hundred scientists from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, India and Nepal.
Less than 40 of the 54,000 glaciers in mountain ranges that extend from Afghanistan to Myanmar are regularly monitored. The Yala glacier is often the first on which trainee glaciologists in the region pass the foot, because it is considered more accessible. Even thus, visiting the glacier requires a day of road from Katmandu more than four days of walking.
Monday, looked at by around fifty people, two commemorative plates sculpted in Nepalese granite will be installed at the base of Yala, with words from the Icelandic and Nepalese authors Andri Snær Magnason and Manjushee Thapa.
Magnason's message to future readers says: “We know what's going on and what to be done. Only, you know if we did.”
