http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2681339.stm
Tuesday, 21 January,
2003, 23:01 GMT
Nepal facing glacier 'catastrophe'
By Richard Wilson
At the Imja glacier lake in eastern Nepal
QUOTE:
"Large glaciers around the world in both hemispheres
have been retreating over the last 100 years"
Chris Folland
Hadley Centre for Climate Research
CAPTION:
"The lake did not exist 25 years ago"
This is a lake that should not exist. It is 6,000 metres
above sea level, a kilometre long and 100 metres deep.
Twenty-five years ago
it was a glacier.
But since then, temperatures
in what is one of the world's
largest ice fields have risen year after year. And the world's
leading climatologists think they know why.
"It's an important
piece of evidence that the climate is actually
warming," said Chris Folland, at the UK's Hadley Centre for
Climate
Research.
"What we've seen
is that the large glaciers around the world
in both hemispheres - South America, Europe, the Himalayas
- have been retreating over the last 100 years."
'Wall of water'
The lake is held in
place by a wall of frozen rock known
as its terminal moraine.
The ice that binds
it together is melting and it is inevitable
that sooner or later this natural dam will burst, releasing
a massive wall of water down the valley.
According to Utan Rai,
a local Sherpa, the glacier is getting
ever smaller in size.
"The lake is becoming
bigger and bigger," he says.
Below the Imja glacier
is the most densely populated
Sherpa valley in Nepal.
The only way to get
here is on foot and everything
is carried in and out on paths that criss-cross the
precipitous river gorges.
When the dam breaks,
it will be a local disaster that
the Nepalese blame on the industrialised West.
"I think the responsibility
lies with everyone," says
Gana Shyam Gurung of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
He believes that greenhouse
gas emissions are to blame.
Catastrophe
looms
Every Himalayan glacier
is in retreat. And it seems
this is a global trend.
Proving a link between
environmental cause and effect
is always very difficult.
So a glacier here in
the Himalayas is in retreat.
Is it some sort of local weather effect?
Is it pollution from
the West causing global warming,
heating up our atmosphere?
All the while the Imja
continues to break up and shrink.
Even if it is a global
trend, the consequences here
will be a local catastrophe.
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