The Grand Thaw: Our Vanishing Cryosphere

Abstract

Records reveal that beginning in the 1950s there has been an accelerated reduction in ice and snow across most mountain glaciers and ice caps. The glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Mountains are the main source of water for the Ganges and the Indus Rivers. During the summer higher temperatures are causing these glaciers to melt at an increasing rate while during the winter the warmer temperature are yielding a dearth of snowfall, which in turn leads to drought. Along the equator in Africa, glaciers are faced with a similar same situation. In Uganda, 80 percent of the glaciers have disappeared since 1850 and by 2050 they are expected to be completely gone. Only 20 percent of the glaciers on Mount Kenya still remain today as the neighboring rivers continue to dry up, and even the majestic Snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are projected to vanish completely by the middle of the 21st century. Since the 1900s, the glaciers that grace the European Alps have lost 50 percent of their mass, and during the 2003 heat wave in which 30,000 Europeans died, a staggering seven feet of ice melted from the Alpine glaciers. Again in 2005, considered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to be the warmest year on record, glacial melt water runoff caused extensive flooding across Switzerland. Even in Glacier National Park most of the glaciers are vanishing and the park is expected to be ice free within the next few decades.