Thread: 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.

“Even if we only assume moderate global warming, it is still highly likely that the ice is going to melt at an alarming rate,” said lead author Jan Lenaerts, a meteorologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. And “the chances of it growing back are very slim,” he said. He said the process was both irreversible and self-reinforcing — because the snow and ice in the tundra and in the waters of northern Canada currently help reflect away some of the sun’s heat.

As they disappear, a larger portion of the suns rays will be absorbed by the water and land, which will cause temperatures to soar. If Canada’s glaciers shrink by 20 percent, as under this scenario, that would correspond to an average global temperature rise of 3°C. However, the temperature jump in the glacial regions of northern Canada would be far higher: 8°C, according to estimates by Lenaerts, who emphasized that this is not even a worst-case scenario.

The scientists urged policymakers to consider the prospect, saying that since 2000, the temperature in Canada’s Arctic Archipelago has risen by 1°C to 2°C, and the volume of ice has significantly diminished. Over the least 20 years, sea level has risen on average by more than 5.3cm. Most of that increase has been attributed to the thermal expansion of water, with just a fifth coming from the melting of the polar ice caps, according to an international study published in November last year in the US journal Science.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../10/2003556751

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

Originally Posted by Wizard From Oz

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??

Originally Posted by Elmer Fudd

Livefree, you have several issues here:

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.

Originally Posted by Elmer Fudd

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........

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.

Originally Posted by Elmer Fudd

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???

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.

Originally Posted by Elmer Fudd

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??

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]

Originally Posted by livefree;1062384046/

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.

"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...

Originally Posted by livefree

Vanishing Glaciers Of The Greater Himalaya - Photographic evidence

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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.

Originally Posted by _Inquisitor_

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.

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.

Originally Posted by _Inquisitor_

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.

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???