Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
<snip>The Chinese Academy of Sciences has therefore set up a fund of 400m yuan ($65m) for research on the Third Pole and, crucially, a quarter of this is earmarked for work outside China.The TPE’s researchers will now monitor a set of bellwether glaciers every six months. They will set up observatories to measure solar radiation, snowfall, meltwater and changes in the soil, as well as air temperature, pressure, humidity and wind. And they plan to take cores from the ice on the Tibetan plateau. These will let them reconstruct the area’s climate over the past few hundred thousand years. Together, these data will give them a better grip on how much—and why—the Third Pole is changing.
High in the Tibetan plateau, the earth has been warming much faster than the rest of the world for the past 50 years. The grasslands are disappearing - along with the livelihood of nomadic herders. In the name of 'ecological restoration', the Chinese government is moving thousands of 'ecological migrants' into new towns where many fall into poverty.
More and more research has shown that the science behind the state’s policies is misguided or incomplete. Inside China, the topic has become somewhat controversial. The government has already spent more than a billion dollars on “restoring” the plateau and few scientists are willing to criticise its approach. Several top Chinese scientists who study the ecology of the region declined to be interviewed for this article, saying the subject is too sensitive. Others were forced by their institutions to cancel scheduled interviews. “We just want for the government’s policies to be based on science,” said one university professor who researches the plateau, and asked that her name not be used for fear of recrimination.Her accusation that the policies are unscientific is serious, because one of the main stated principles of the Chinese government is “scientific development”. Environmentalists in the west often look longingly at the fact that there is virtually no debate among China’s leaders about whether or not the world’s climate is changing. But that doesn’t make it easier to craft policies that deal with the problem.
The Tibetan glaciers are shrinking. Most of the retreat is thought to be taking place at low elevations, but research now shows that the glaciers may also be losing ice at altitudes up to 6,000 metres.“The glaciers are virtually being decapitated from the top by a warming climate,” says Kang Shichang, a glaciologist at Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing.
A core from the Lanong glacier in southern Tibet shows neither the tritium peak associated with nuclear testing nor any trace of radioactive compounds from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986. This suggests that ice layers laid down on the glacier from the 1950s onwards have melted or sublimated away.The second ice core, from the Guoqu glacier in central Tibet, has the chemical fingerprints of the nuclear tests and the Galunggung volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1982, but not the Chernobyl signal. Moreover, the core's mercury content, which tracks well with global and regional emission trends, ends abruptly in the 1980s. “The glacier has been losing ice in the past three decades,” says Kang.
I've just seen a amazing programme on Channel 4 (UK). They investigated the yeti in the Himalayas. The final conclusion was that DNA testing on two samples of hair revealed the animal from which the hair was taken to have polar bear DNA! The scientist concerned suspected that the animal was a hybrid bear/polar bear, but the polar bear part coming from early in the Pleistocene, at the time when polar bears emerged from the other bear populations as a seperate species. The closest DNA match was from a jaw bone dating back to the early Pleistocene from Svalbard.
But two other scientists have said re-analysis of the same data shows the hairs belong to the Himalayan bear, a sub-species of the brown bear....Prof Sykes and the other members of the team behind the earlier yeti hairs analysis have acknowledged that there was an error caused by an incomplete search of the DNA database used.However, they said in a statement: "Importantly, for the thrust of the paper as a whole, the conclusion that these Himalayan 'yeti' samples were certainly not from a hitherto unknown primate is unaffected."
Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at The Ohio State University (O.S.U.) in Columbus, does not believe in the impossible. More than three decades ago he led an expedition that retrieved ice cores from the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru at 5,670 meters above sea level, which most glaciologists at the time considered too high for humans to conduct this kind of work. The exquisitely preserved layers of dust and air bubbles in the cores provided an unprecedented climate history of the tropics, and Thompson’s work has come to focus on the increasingly important climate change lessons to be learned from Earth’s so-called “third pole”—the ancient and massive buildup of glacial ice straddling the subtropics in Tibet.Thompson has since led more than 60 expeditions around the world, painstakingly retrieving ice cores from low and middle latitudes in 16 countries, including the world’s highest ice-core site on the Dasuopu Glacier in Tibet at 7,200 meters. In September 2015—three and half years after having a heart transplant—the 67-year-old glaciologist reached 6,700 meters on Tibet’s Guliya Ice Cap.
[Tibetan ice cores] have given us a glimpse of Tibet’s climate history going back to more than half a million years. We learned that the extent of glaciation is related to how far monsoonal rains penetrate the Tibetan Plateau. This is in step with the slow wobbling of Earth’s rotational axis, which drives tropical rainfall in 21,000-year cycles. We also identified periods when average temperatures in Tibet went up and down by several degrees Celsius in roughly 200-year cycles. It’s still a mystery why that was the case, but we suspect this may be related to the 205-year cycle of solar activity.In more recent times an interesting discovery is that the higher the elevation, the greater warming we have. This is in line with the observation that the vast majority of glaciers in Tibet and the Himalayas are retreating. In some extreme cases, as ice cores from the Naimona’nyi Glacier in southern Tibet show, all the snow and ice that accumulated since 1950 has melted or sublimated away at altitudes as high as 6,000 meters above sea level.[This ice loss] is not unique to Tibetan and Himalayan glaciers. The picture is the same for nearly all mountain glaciers around the world. The summit ice cover of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, has shrunk by 85 percent in the past century. If the current climate conditions persist, it won’t be long before Africa’s highest mountain is ice-free. At the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Peruvian Andes, glaciers that accumulated over 1,600 years have melted in just 25 years.Such analyses provide some of the strongest evidence to date that our climate is going through a period of unprecedented warming on a large scale. One of the biggest challenges we face in the 21st century is how to get along with each other, and another is how to get along with our planet. The world should act together to curb emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
2nd massive ice avalanche in Tibet“Even one of these gigantic glacier avalanches is very unusual. Two within close geographical and temporal vicinity is, to our best knowledge, unprecedented.”
The most important fact about the avalanche, said Thompson, is that it lasted only four or five minutes (according to witnesses), yet it managed to bury 3.7 square miles of the valley floor in that time. He said something–likely meltwater at the base of the glacier–must have lubricated the ice to speed its flow down the mountain.“Given the rate at which the event occurred and the area covered, I think it could only happen in the presence of meltwater,” Thompson said. Other nearby glaciers may be vulnerable, he added, “but unfortunately as of today, we have no ability to predict such disasters.”
