glaciers
There is little doubt that melting glaciers of Tibetan Plateau provide a key source of water in the summer months providing 70 percent of the summer flow in the Ganges and 50-60 percent of the flow in other major rivers. Perhaps the most critical region in which the melting glaciers will negatively affect water will be China and parts of Asia, including India. The melting glaciers will...
In northern Nepal, glaciers are receding. In the middle belt, forest fires are ravaging the hills and a withering drought has decimated farmlands. In the south, we've seen flash floods last year, and everything from fires to droughts this year. Have all these calamities been caused by global warming? Climate experts call Nepal a "hot spot" because the average temperature rise that our country...
Maurice Duchene is a glacial cave explorer who presented his observations to ICIMOD on 28 April, 2009. He has been visiting caves over a number of years in the Nepal Himalayas: namely the Annapurnas, Gokyo and Khumbu regions.
His theory is that the water underneath these caves and in the glacial lakes were not just coming from the melt snow and ice, some were coming from underneath. On...
Glacier mass changes are considered to represent key variables related to climate variability. The authors have reconstructed a proxy for annual mass-balance changes in Grosse Aletschgletscher, Swiss Alps, back to AD 1500 using a non-linear back-propagation neural network (BPN). The model skill of the BPN performs better than reconstructions using conventional stepwise multiple linear...
For centuries high mountains and glaciers have been a source of both paralyzing fear and strange fascination. Natural scientists first began to show interest in Alpine glaciers at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but although the first simple observations of glacier movements and moraines were made, no systematic scientific investigations were carried out.
The nineteenth...
European Alpine glaciers are sensitive indicators of past climate and are thus valuable sources of climate history. Unfortunately, direct determinations of glacier changes (length variations and mass changes) did not start with increasing accuracy until just before the end of the 19th century. Therefore, historical and physical methods have to be used to reconstruct glacier variability...
Mountain Meteo Services is a website that gives information on mountain weather, with state of the art forecasts for mountain regions. This fact sheet also provides some useful references to documents on expeditions in the Himalayas and academic papers on snow, weather and glaciers.
Visit the Mountain Meteo Services website at http://www.meteoexploration.com/
Water as a result of snow and glacier melt is an important resource in the Central Andes of Chile and Argentina, which in terms of precipitation are close to climatic deserts, yet they support large populations and a rich agriculture. In spite of this, little is known of the processes at play and the variability over time. In particular, the specific mechanisms of energy balance and melt on...
Mountains are important for the world's water supply. But mountain systems are both disaster and water hotspots which climate change will exacerbate, and the HKH region - being the largest, highest mountain systems in the world providing essential ecosystems services for humankind - deserves global attention and concern. ICIMOD's participation in the World Water Forum highlighted the mountain...
New Yorker staff writer Kolbert (The Prophet of Love, 2004) reports from the frontlines of global warming. Based on a three-part series that appeared in the magazine, this slim volume conveys through telling detail the changes already being wrought by human-induced global warming. For most Americans, this issue is not yet "close to home," Kolbert writes; the early effects are found...
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