Water for millions at risk as glaciers melt away

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Water for millions at risk as glaciers melt away

. Crisis threatens parts of South America and Asia
. Decline accelerates as global warming takes hold

David Adam, environment correspondent
Wednesday October 11, 2006
The Guardian

The world's glaciers and ice caps are now in terminal decline because of
global warming, scientists have discovered. A survey has revealed that
the rate of melting across the world has sharply accelerated in recent
years, placing even previously stable glaciers in jeopardy. The loss of
glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of
millions of people within a few decades, the experts warn.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, who
led the research, said: "The glaciers are going to melt and melt until
they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more."

Loss of land-based ice is one of the clearest signals of global
temperature rise, and the state of glaciers has become a key argument in
the debate over climate change. Last year, New Scientist magazine
published a letter from the television botanist David Bellamy, a
renowned climate sceptic, which claimed that 555 of 625 glaciers
measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service have been growing since
1980. His claim was quickly discredited, but the perception that
glaciers are both growing and shrinking remains.

Dr Kaser said that "99.99% of all glaciers" were now shrinking.
Increased winter snowfall meant that a few, most notably in New Zealand
and Norway, got bigger during the 1990s, he said, but a succession of
very warm summers since then had reversed the trend. His team combined
different sets of measurements which used stakes and holes drilled into
the ice to record the change in mass of more than 300 glaciers since the
1940s. They extrapolated these results to cover thousands of smaller and
remote glaciers not directly surveyed.

The results revealed that the world's glaciers and ice caps - defined as
all land-based ice except the mighty Greenland and West Antarctic ice
sheets - grew steadily until about 1970, when they began to shrink. The
rate of shrinking increased significantly in 2001. On average, the
world's glaciers and ice caps lost enough water between 1961 and 1990 to
raise global sea levels by 0.35-0.4 mm each year. For 2001-2004, the
figure rose to 0.8-1mm each year.

Dr Kaser said it was unclear why the glaciers grew from 1940 to 1970,
but speculated it was because increased air pollution blocked sunlight -
a phenomenon known as global dimming. Writing in the journal Geophysical
Research Letters, the scientists say: "Late 20th century glacier wastage
is essentially a response to post-1970 global warming." Dr Kaser said:
"There is very, very strong evidence that this is down to human-caused
changes in the atmosphere."

Emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat in the
atmosphere, warming the surface. One of the first impacts of glacier
melting is likely to be in South America. In August, a report from 20
UK-based environment and development groups warned that Andean glaciers
are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15-25
years.

This would deny major cities water supplies and put populations and food
supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina
and Bolivia.

Other countries are noticing the effects. Studies show snow and ice
cover in the eastern Himalayas has shrunk by about 30% since the 1970s.
Melting glaciers have created lakes in the mountains which could burst
and cause widespread flooding. Of 150 glaciers that once stood in
Glacier National Park in the northern US, only 27 remain. The US
Environmental Protection Agency says the biggest are a third the size
they were in 1850. Continued warming could melt them completely by 2030.