State of Himalayan glaciers less alarming than feared

University of Zurich: Several hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia depend, to varying degrees, on the freshwater reservoirs of the Himalayan glaciers. Consequently, it is important to detect the potential impact of climate changes on the Himalayan glaciers at an early stage. Together with international researchers, glaciologists from the University of Zurich now reveal that the glaciers in the Himalayas are declining less rapidly than was previously thought. However, the scientists see major hazard potential from outbursts of glacial lakes.

Ever since the false prognoses of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Himalayan glaciers have been a focus of public and scientific debate. The gaps in our knowledge of glaciers in the Himalayan region have hindered accurate statements and prognoses. An international team of researchers headed by glaciologists from the University of Zurich and with the involvement of scientists from Geneva now outlines the current state of knowledge of glaciers in the Himalayas in a study published in Science. The scientists confirm that the shrinkage scenarios for Himalayan glaciers published in the last IPCC report were exaggerated.

The most up-to-date mappings so far based on satellite data revealed that glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram cover a total area of approximately 40,800 km². While this is around twenty times larger than all glaciers of the European Alps put together, it is as much as twenty percent smaller than was previously assumed. Lead scientist Tobias Bolch, who researches at the University of Zurich and Dresden University of Technology, mainly puts this down to erroneous mappings in earlier studies.

..."The detected length changes and area and volume losses correspond to the global average,” explains Bolch, summarizing the new results. “The majority of the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, but much less rapidly than predicted earlier.”...

The eastern terminus of Imja Lake where it meets Imja Glacier, in Nepal, shot by Daniel Alton Byers, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license