Frozen no more: Indonesia’s only tropical glacier could melt away as soon as 2025
JAKARTA: Primary school students in Indonesia are taught that the country has something significant, a tropical glacier in Papua’s Jayawijaya mountains which is the only one in the region.
Located at Jaya summit or Puncak Jaya in the Indonesian language, some people call it the Eternity Glacier.
However, in a few years, teachers may not be able to tell their students about this geographical trivia.
After existing for about 5,000 years, the days of the glacier are numbered as research shows that it is melting and there is only a little left of it.
“The year when the glacier would be gone is between 2025 to 2027,” Mr Donaldi Permana, a climate research and development coordinator with the country’s meteorological, climatological and geophysical agency (BMKG) told CNA. He has studied the glacier extensively since 2009.
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Other tropical glaciers in South America and Africa are also melting, Mr Permana noted.
However, as the elevation of Puncak Jaya is lower as compared to the other mountains with tropical glaciers, the one in Indonesia will disappear sooner.
THE MELTING IS ACCELERATING
Earlier studies have measured the area of the glacier, said Mr Permana.
Based on the soil maturity and vegetation distribution patterns around the glacier, it was concluded that the glacier area was about 19 sq km in 1850, he said.
Satellite imagery later showed that the glacier area was down to only 2 sq km in 2002.
By 2018, the size was only 0.46 sq km. Last year, it was 0.27 sq km. This means that the melting has accelerated over time.
To learn more about the glacier, Mr Permana and his colleagues extracted ice cores from it in 2010 by drilling 32m down to the bedrock. The ice cores were then taken to be examined.
The team also installed polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes to measure how much of the glacier is melting by looking at its thickness.
In 2015, they found that the pipe was exposed by 5m. “This means 1m of depth was gone per year,” Mr Permana noted.
They also noted that in 2016 when El Nino caused drier and warmer weather over Indonesia, the melting accelerated.
“From 2015 to 2016, in just one year, we lost 5m of depth,” he added.
He said that from 2016 to 2021, a further 12.5m of depth has been lost.
“Based on those figures, we can conclude that there is an acceleration (of melting),” he said. This was expected because when the glacier melts, the area around it becomes bigger, absorbing more solar radiation, added Mr Permana.
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“Maybe this (Indonesian) glacier’s contribution is not so significant because the initial area is not so big compared to the ones in South America or Greenland … But the animals and trees around the Papua area could be impacted by the melting, although unfortunately there is no study on this yet.”
Mr Permana also revealed that there is an indigenous tribe living around the area who worships the glacier. However, there has so far been no known study about this group and how they may be affected if the glacier disappears.
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https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/indonesia-only-tropical-glacier-puncak-jaya-melting-2631916