SOMMER: Greenland is losing about 280 billion tons of ice a year. Mohammad Ali Shah, head of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), grew up here and swam in this sea as a child. Earth's glaciers are shrinking, and in the past 20 years, the rate of shrinkage has steadily sped up, according to a new study of nearly every glacier on the planet. In 2006 it constructed a dam without informing India and Pakistan, which heavily depend on the river. Humans already use 95 percent of the Indus, and the population of the basin is growing fast. Zooming in on these regions, the authors found that regional climate conditions, specifically long-term fluctuations in precipitation and temperature, helped explain these stark differences. The barrage at Sukkur, visible in the distance, was built during colonial times. phys.org - University of Cambridge 8h. These are dynamic, complex places. SOMMER: You know, some of the other connections to ice are less obvious, maybe. At that time, global sea level was more than 400 feet lower than it is today, and glaciers covered approximately: 8% of Earths surface 25% of Earths land area 33% of Alaska Beginning about 15,000 years ago, continental glaciers retreated and sea level began to rise. The Hoper and Barpu Glaciers have melted back so far that settlements and their laboriously constructed irrigation networks have been drained. That is a global concern because glacier loss is a bigger source of sea level rise than the polar ice sheets. HERSHER: Yeah. Assessing and predicting the effect of glaciers on water resources require a monitoring program to provide basic data for this understanding. In this way, they provide a steady flow that nourishes humans and ecosystems. It continued for 12 days. The debris dammed the Immit River, forming a new lake, 20 feet deep, that destroyed his home and 41 others. This is causing the ice sheet to shrink and the glaciers to retreat toward land. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Accuracy and availability may vary. The uniformity of the pattern alarms him. That includes quite a bit of environmental monitoring. The territory ahead was largely uncharted. When Muir visited, this was an advancing body of ice on its way to becoming one of the mightiest mountain glaciers in the world. Emerging technologies, complemented by the availability of satellite imagery, allow USGS scientists to create Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) that provide data on the elevation of glacier ice. Both Pakistan and India have ancient water-harvesting traditions, adapted to the rhythms of the river and the rains, that have been neglected since British times. Since Muir, the scientific baton has been handed down through generations of Glacier Bay specialists William Cooper, Edward LaChapelle, Austin Post, Mauri Pelto and Christopher McNeil. This poison is shortening our lives, Kumar said. The ocean is not like a bathtub where, like, melting ice is the faucet, and the water rises uniformly everywhere. Writing recently in the journal Nature, an international group of scientists (supported by the National Geographic Society) analyzed glacial water towers worldwide. Glaciers mostly lose mass through ice melt, but they also shrink due to other processes, such as sublimation, where water evaporates directly from the ice, and calving, where large chunks of ice break off the edge of a glacier, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each withdrawal a retreat. Everyone I met, from peasants to politicians, thought the river was being mismanaged. Not specifically. When they withdraw, they leave behind new habitats for trees, moss and mammals. Warming Seas Are Accelerating Greenland For a glacier to remain at a constant size, there must be a So thousands of miles away - Lauren, that sounds like it is not believable, that it's not possible. Glaciers are shrinking fast. Scientists are rushing to figure out how These vacationers are at the confluence of the Indus and Zaskar Rivers, west of Leh. Are today's glaciers leftovers from the Pleistocene ice age? The proposal is too radical to become law. That's not good news. In the upper Indus Basin, glaciers no longer advance or retreat glacially. Climate change, Abbas argues, could be a blessing for Pakistanan incentive to rethink the system. A seal rests on ice in Glacier Bay, Alaska. As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the While there is no global standard for what size a body of ice must be to be considered a glacier, USGS scientists in Glacier National Park use the commonly accepted guideline of 0.1 square kilometers (about 25 acres) as the minimum size of a glacier. The gates reopened after a few weeks. That may be what happened in 2018 to Shishper, another glacier nearby: It suddenly began sliding toward the town of Hassanabad, advancing as much as 120 feet a day. He was sieving sand from freezing river water, then rolling it with toxic mercury in his palm to extract specks of gold. They would absorb floodwaters, thus avoiding a repeat of the 2010 disaster, and at the same time recharge the aquifers. The global loss of glaciers, and consequent implications for water resources, sea level rise, and ecosystem function underscores the importance of U.S. Geological Survey glaciology research to facilit. The alternative, in which the river continues to be squandered and new weather gods add to the chaos, is too scary to contemplate. After advancing throughout the 20th century, this vast glacier seemed immune to climate change. On the edge of the Indus Delta, its one of the worlds largest water-stressed cities: Fifteen million people have sucked its aquifer dry. Shishper rolled over irrigation channels and crashed into a bridge. Groundwater reserves in Punjab have been seriously depleted in part by flood irrigation of rice, which was introduced to the region in the 1960s, during the green revolution.Right: Balbir Singh Seechewal, a Sikh environmentalist, shows off the water treatment plant he built in Sichewali after deciding that pollution threatened spiritual as well as physical health. So that's one of the major threats from climate change. The debris dammed the Immit River, forming a new lake, 20 feet deep, that destroyed his home and 41 others. Officials on the Indian side asserted their power immediately in spring 1948, shutting the gates of the headworks. It won't be its last. Gruesome video reveals the moment a 5-foot alligator corpse was cut from the gut of a dead python, 1,200-year-old 'Viking graffiti' is the oldest drawing ever discovered in Iceland, See the moment a 28-year-old lab chimp glimpses the open sky for the 1st time, Maya canoe surrounded by animal and human bones found in 'portal to the underworld' in Mexico, Elephants' giant, hot testicles could stop them getting cancer, Mushroom-shaped superplume of scorching hot rock may be splitting Africa in 2. These estimates significantly narrow the uncertainty around how much mass glaciers lost in recent decades, Hugonnet said. It had been diminished by the demands of irrigation, industry, and daily life. Here, at the end of the canal system, women and children were out in the fields, harvesting the famous Dundicut chili. It depends on which glaciers you are considering. So we'll need to adapt our homes and our cities to deal with that no matter what. I was struck by how the Indus, celebrated from ancient times in sacred Sanskrit hymns, was treated as a resource but no longer as an object of reverence. In 2013 Leh, Ladakhs capital, replaced diesel generators with cleaner hydroelectricity. How much of the Earth's water is stored in glaciers? Repeat photographyandaerial / satellite photo analysisprovide evidence of glacier loss in terms of shape and area. They are the size of entire states. But today, the melting of mountain glaciers is the bigger problem, contributing more than a quarter of the extra volume being added to the worlds oceans. WebGlaciers are replenished mainly by snowfall and shrink primarily by melting, runoff, or breaking off of icebergs. It looked like a train, local geologist Deedar Karim told me. In Alaska, this has been documented in precise detail. The next morning I took tea with a landowner and former federal minister, then spoke with the manager of a 6,000-acre mango farm, where servants were watering a rose garden in the desert. As glaciers disappear in Alaska, the rest of the worlds ice follows Were Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay really the first to summit the worlds highest peak? A water crisis looms for 270 million people as South Asias glaciers And researchers are trying to figure out just how much more that melt is going to accelerate. Bona and Mt. Most glacier ice forms through the metamorphism of tens of thousands of individual snowflakes into crystals of glacier ice. Hubbard Glacier has been advancing for more than 100 years and has twice closed the entrance to Russell Fiord during the last 16 years by squeezing and pushing submarine g, Dennis C. Trabant, Rod S. March, Donald S. Thomas, Major changes in the length, speed, surface altitude, and calving rate of Columbia Glacier, Alaska have been recorded with stereo vertical photography acquired on 119 dates from 1957 to 2000. But here's something a lot of people don't know. On another evening, he stands transfixed at a sunset that spreads crimson light across the Fairweather mountains and then down to the ice-filled bay. It is as though the pulsating lights on a Christmas tree were steadily dimming and starting to flicker out in tandem. Declining waters from glaciers or mountains in general do not necessarily need to be a problem. In recent decades climate change has sped up the melting of glaciers that feed the Indus, causing unprecedented flooding. And you can catch the next story later today on All Things Considered. In particular, a 20-year archive of images from NASA's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), a high-resolution sensor aboard the Terra satellite, supplied the team with a wealth of data and allowed them to make more certain estimates of glacier mass loss through time. It was October. Latest Earthquakes | Live WebChatShare Social Media. Downstream, in the plains of Pakistan and northern India, the worlds most extensive system of irrigated agriculture depends on the Indus. Currently, the volume of land ice on Earth is decreasing, driving consequential changes to global sea level and local stream A Greenland glacier is growing. And without it, more sunlight is warming the ocean. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Water shortages on both sides of the border are at crisis levels. Pumping groundwater is expensive; every year they have to bore deeper wells as the water table fallsto 400 feet in some places. They're just really huge parts of the planet. The countrys highest rates of all, said Daanish Mustafa, a Pakistani geographer at Kings College London, are in the irrigated districts, where agricultural practice prioritizes export crops over food security. At the edge of the Jakobshavn Glacier in western Greenland, bergs break off and pile up. MARTNEZ: Rebecca, why is it so hard to figure that out? Normally, it is the same with glaciers. Thats hard to take., For city residents who have never seen a glacier up close, that may seem a remote concern, but distance can be misleading as Muir observed in perhaps his most famous line: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe., The man on a mission to reveal the souls of vanishing glaciers, Antarctic doomsday glacier may be melting faster than was thought, World will lose 10% of glacier ice even if it hits climate targets, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. But along the Indus, it could trigger a conflict that changes the world overnight. Argentina's famous cyclical monument has a demise fueled by its own creation. Its lakes were polluted with effluents and sewage. Tidal glacial systems, like those Muir visited, also function as a climatic financial system accumulating, saving and redistributing precipitation over decades and centuries. All rights reserved. Even the remote Antarctic is not immune. Shrinking glaciers are categorical evidence of climate change, study says Robert McSweeney 12.12.2016 | 4:00pm Glaciers Shrinking glaciers are categorical And it could mean more hot, dry weather in the Western U.S. during wildfire season. The world's massive ice sheets and glaciers are melting as climate change raises temperatures. Below this size, ice is generally stagnant and does not have enough mass to move. All this week, NPR's Climate Desk is looking at those effects. Should you buy the Sony WF-1000XM4 wireless earbuds? Kinjhar Lake, an Indus-fed reservoir 60 miles away, is their nearest source. Already it was clear that it was under strain. When independence was declared in 1947, and the Partition of the old British colony created India and Pakistan, each country got less of the Indus than it wanted. A team led by Joel Podgorski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology reported in 2017 that up to 60 million people in the Indus Basin may drink groundwater contaminated by arsenic. The ice-fed torrent of the mountains spreads to its full breadth in the plains of Sindh in southern Pakistan. As the climate gets hotter, the world's ice sheets and glaciers are disappearing. Klinaklini Glacier, the largest glacier in Western Canada, Photo gallery: Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier cracks, In photos: Huge icebergs break off Antarctica, Adorable extinct penguin was one of the smallest of its kind to ever walk Earth, tiny skull fossils reveal, James Webb telescope detects the earliest strand in the 'cosmic web' ever seen, Could Ozempic be used to treat addiction? One way to fight climate change: Make your own glaciers. In the decades since he has returned multiple times, and has worked on glaciers every summer, camping on them for more than 800 nights. Churchill) is about 30,000 years old. 1). The two snapshots can then be used to reconstruct the 3D topography of Earth's surface, and in this case, the 3D structure of glaciers across the planet. REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: You know, these are really, really massive areas, so they don't melt the way, like, an ice cube would, you know, gently liquefying in the sun. Study of nearly every glacier on Earth shows ice loss is speeding up The ice rivers ran down into the ocean, making them tidewater glaciers, which wax and wane over centuries, each at a different pace. These women are working at Tibba Sultanpur in Punjab.Right: Fabric from factories such as this one at Khurrianwala, Punjab, contributes more than half of Pakistans foreign exchange earnings. Research shows shrinking Arctic glaciers are unearthing a new All rights reserved. When I reached Tibet in 2006, on my journey to the source, I was shocked to find that there was no water in the Indus: China had recently dammed the rivers upper reaches. The international community pushed the countries to build more dams and canals. A lock () or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. Some of this satellite data captured changes in surface elevation, but only sampled a few places and at sparse time points. Their stories on the far-reaching effects of ice air all this week. Linemen connect a house to the grid in Saboo, Ladakh. Tracking average glacier mass loss, on a global scale, can help scientists predict global sea-level rise; but on a local scale, glacier mass loss can drastically alter nearby bodies of water and the availability of water resources, as well as threaten to trigger disasters, such as avalanches and devastating spring floods, Hugonnet said. The meltwater itself speeds up the whole process. And all kinds of things influence them. SOMMER: Yeah. As the Earth heats up due to climate change, glaciers are melting. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. North of Kangrinboqe, the great river bubbles modestly out of the ground, as if that four-armed goddess were breathing out. When the Glaciers Disappear, Those Species Will Go Extinct WebPetteri Taalas, the WMO Secretary-General, said the climate indicators in Africa during last year were characterized by continued warming temperatures, accelerating sea-level rise, extreme weather, and climate events - such as floods, landslides and droughts. Other satellites detected slight shifts in the Earth's gravitational field, but could not disentangle how much glacier shrinkage contributed to these shifts, as opposed to mass changes in ice sheets or solid earth, for instance. Johns Hopkins Glacier. In parts of the Canadian Rockies, he said, today's glaciers will all but disappear completely, while others will shrink to remnants just 5 to 20 percent of their current size. WebWhy are our glaciers shrinking? Are electric bikes the future of green transportation? China controls the headwaters of the river. Yes and no. MARTNEZ: That is the sound of summertime in Greenland, where ice is rapidly melting. In Punjab the new border cut through five tributaries, giving Pakistan most of the farming settlements around the canals but leaving India with the headworks at Firozpur, on the Sutlej River. In May the temperature reached 117 degrees, withering the crop. In Glacier Bay, he described an older one breaking apart. In an alley in Goth Ibrahim Haidri, a fishing village near Karachi, I passed a line of women waiting with their waterpots for a tank truck. The Indus is the most critical, they said: Given the regions high baseline water stress and limited government effectiveness, it is unlikely that the Indus can sustain this pressure. Pakistan will suffer most. The boulders were colliding. Because the sensor orbits Earth about 438 miles (750 kilometers) above the planet's surface, it can snap images of the same locations from multiple angles: once as it passes directly over a spot and once as if it's "looking back" from where it came. To zero in on a more precise estimate, the team used myriad satellite and aerial images to survey 217,175 glaciers, accounting for nearly all of Earth's glaciers. At long last, the American buffalo has come home. They were cultivating fields and trees there in my childhood, said Niat Ali, a 60-year-old ex-army man. Heres how it works. Melting glaciers also present a more urgent threat. But cotton is a water-intensive crop, and in recent years, erratic weather patternsheat waves followed by unusually heavy rainshave resulted in low yields. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. There was a time when humans were so grateful for rivers, they made them into divinities. Like Pakistans trucks, they were painted in a riot of colors, adorned with flowers and fish. So let's start with sea level rise. All rights reserved. For Peito, who had personally worked on 250 glaciers, the fall of the last hold-out against global warming was a sobering moment. "What was even more interesting, and a bit surprising, was to see that some regions decelerated and others accelerated," Hugonnet said. The Indus had changed out of all recognition from the mighty river described by British colonial officials. But water diversions upstream have caused it to stagnate, while agricultural runoff draining into the lake has killed most fish and made the water too polluted to drink without treatment. About three-quarters of Earth's freshwater is stored in glaciers. In this corner of Alaska, the brightest and biggest until very recently was Taku, the primary outlet glacier of the Juneau Icefield which neighbours Glacier Bay. glacier
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