Baishui No 1 Glacier said to have lost 60 per cent of its mass since 1982Hulk of ice feeds Asia’s 10 largest rivers, including the Yangtze and Mekong
A loud crack rang out from the fog above the Baishui No 1 Glacier in southern China as a stone shard careered down the ice, flying past Chen Yanjun as he operated a GPS device.
More projectiles were tumbling down the hulk of ice that scientists say is one of the world’s fastest melting glaciers.
“We should go,” the 30-year-old geologist said. “The first rule is safety.”
Chen hiked away and onto a barren landscape once buried beneath the glacier. Now there is exposed rock littered with oxygen tanks discarded by tourists visiting the blanket of ice standing 4,570 meters (15,000 feet) high.
Millions of people each year are drawn to Baishui’s frosty beauty on the southeastern edge of the Third Pole – a region in Central Asia with the world’s third-largest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland that is roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.
Third Pole glaciers are vital to billions of people from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Asia’s 10 largest rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong and Ganges, are fed by seasonal melting.
“You’re talking about one of the world’s largest freshwater sources,” said Ashley Johnson, energy programme manager at the National Bureau of Asian Research, an American think tank.
“Depending on how it melts, a lot of the freshwater will be leaving the region for the ocean, which will have a severe impact on water and food security.
Earth is today 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than pre-industrial levels because of climate change – enough to melt 28 to 44 per cent of glaciers worldwide, according to a new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperatures are expected to keep rising.
Baishui is about as close to the equator as Tampa, Florida, and the impact of climate change is already dramatic.
The glacier has lost 60 per cent of its mass and shrunk 250 meters since 1982, according to a 2018 report in the Journal of Geophysical Research .
Scientists found in 2015 that 82 per cent of glaciers surveyed in China had retreated and said the effects of glacier melting on water resources were gradually becoming “increasingly serious” for the world’s most populous country.
