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Everest ice ‘shrivels’ in global warming
A photograph of Mt. Everest taken by climbing legend George Mallory in 1921 (left). A picture taken by mountaineer David Breashears at the same spot in 2007. The dotted line shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier’s height in 1921. The 2007 photo shows a loss of
NEW YORK, JUL 16 -
When British climbing legend George Mallory took his iconic 1921 photo of Mount Everest’s north face, the mighty, river-shaped glacier snaking under his feet seemed eternal.
Decades of pollution and global warming later, modern mountaineer David Breashears has reshot the picture at the same spot — and proved an alarming reality.
Instead of the powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice witnessed by Mallory before he died on his conquest of Everest, the Main Rongbuk Glacier today is shrunken and withered. The frozen waves of ice pinnacles—many of them the size of office buildings—are still there. But they are far fewer, lower and confined to a narrow line.
Comparing precisely matched photographs, Breashears determined that the Rongbuk had dropped some 97 meters in depth.
“The melt rate in this region of central and eastern Himalaya is extreme and is devastating,” Breashears said on Wednesday at New York’s Asia Society, which is hosting the exhibition (http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/) from July 13 to August 15.
Amid bad-tempered political debates over the causes and reality of global warming, Breashears speaks literally from the ground.
He went in the footsteps of three great early mountaineer-photographers: Mallory, Canadian-born mapping pioneer Edward Wheeler, and Italy’s Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and 20th centuries.The result is then-and-now sets from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan showing seven glaciers in retreat—not only much diminished, but in one case having dissolved into a lake.
“If this isn’t evidence of the glaciers in serious decline, I don’t know what is,” the soft-spoken Breashears said.
The melting glaciers pose more than a threat to the “ultimate harmony” Mallory once described finding in these beautiful peaks.
Himalayan glaciers are the world’s third largest reserve of ice after the north and south poles, and their seasonal melt water is a crucial source for Asia’s great rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong and Yellow.
Asia Society’s China expert Orville Schell described Nepal as “a kind of a headquarters for the hydrology of the whole of Asia.”
As a result, rapid melting is triggering a “cascade of effects all downstream, whether it’s animals, plants, rivers, agriculture, people,” he said.
Posted on: 2010-07-17 09:57
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