Himalayan Ice Fields Have Not Grown in Fifty Years

Starting with Los Alamos, repeated atomic explosions altered the isotopic composition of the Earth's atmosphere in a way that is easily seen in historic proxyindicator records such as ice cores, lake cores, tree rings, and so on.

Recently raised cores from the Himalayan ice fields, when analyzed, failed to show this global signal. This strongly suggests that these ice fields have not grown during the last fifty years, or more.

The ice fields provide an important buffer in the headwaters of major rivers relied on today for agriculture and other uses by a very large number of people.

Similar findings have occurred elsewhere. For instance, it is predicted that the glaciers on Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, will be gone in about 7 to 10 years from now. Eighty percent of the 15,000 or so mountain glaciers in the Himalayas are expected to be melted away in about twenty to twenty five years from now.

Details here.

More like this

A new concern arose around the turn of the 21st century, among the advancements in technology and science: what is the future of our planet's climate? This is a bold question, considering traditional problems with predicting the future. We have no evidence of future events, due to the asymmetry of…
Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance &…
Law professor Glenn Reynolds calls Al Gore a fuddy-duddy: How to be a 21st century fuddy-duddy. Reynolds' source is novelist Roger L Simon, who writes: What fascinates about Al Gore is not - as this article from the Chicago Sun-Times shows so clearly - that he is full of hooey when it comes to his…
Snow. Glaciers. Icecaps, River flows. All of these are vulnerable to climate change, especially rising temperature. This isn't just theory. It’s now observable fact.   Scientists worry about the growing threat of climate change because the global climate is tied to everything that society cares…

Whilst, ironically, the pace at which we're trying to combat global warming is...glacial!