NEW DELHI, INDIA, December 24, 2006: A joint Indian-Chinese team plans to chart remote Himalayan glaciers that scientists fear are rapidly melting because of global warming, threatening the great rivers that give life to one of South Asia’s most fertile regions. The two expeditions will take scientist into some of the most remote areas of Tibet to explore the sources of two rivers that provide water for vast agriculture regions that feed nearly a sixth of the world’s population. “The melting of the ice sheets and the glaciers is a crisis in the Himalayas,” said H.P.S. Ahluwalia, who runs the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, which is organizing the expedition with China’s Institute of Geology and Geophysics. Scientists believe that increasing global temperatures are causing glaciers–the planet’s largest source of fresh water after polar ice–to melt. The short-term result has been flooding, but some fear that over the long term the glaciers will melt entirely and the rivers will run dry for months at a time, fed only by annual rains like the monsoon that sweeps across the subcontinent every summer.
Scientist will study the sources of the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra, two rivers which flow from the Himalayas into northern India where the fertile plains they feed form the backbone of a society that is still largely agricultural. Almost every one of more than 300 large glaciers studied worldwide is in retreat, international glaciologists reported in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The dangers faced by Himalayan glaciers have been exacerbated by India’s and China’s huge populations and fast-growing economies, which rely heavily on coal as an energy source. Beginning in September 2007, expedition teams will explore the glaciers around Mt. Gang Rinpoche, which is 21,778 feet high, and Mt. Loinbo Kangri, at an elevation of 23,277 feet. Neither mountain has been scientifically surveyed in nearly a century.