Glaciers in Asia’s celestial mountains in trouble

A local rise in temperatures, perhaps linked to climate change in the north Pacific and north Atlantic oceans, means ever more precipitation is falling as rain in summertime on the Tien Shan, eroding glacier ice, the study found.

The glaciers located in the Tian Shan Mountains of Asia have lost over 25% of their full mass the past 50 years, which is a loss rate of more than four times greater than the average for glaciers globally over the same period, shows new research.

“Another way to deal with the decline in water supplies in this region is to improve irrigation practices there”.

Tech Times reports that Central Asia’s glacier loss along the Tien Shan mountain is extreme enough to raise concerns about security of water supply for people living in that part of China, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Glacier melt is an essential water resource in an otherwise dry environment. The researcher at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam goes on to say, “Within a year, winter precipitation is stored until summer, when it gets released as meltwater”. “Despite this importance, only little was known about how glaciers in this region changed over the last century” the principal investigator Daniel Farinotti explains. Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist and lead author of the study said.

However, scientists say that crucial data about the state of glaciers in the Tian Shan mountains is limited which is why estimations of how these glaciers can change in the future is rather insufficient.

“This way, we were able to reconstruct the evolution of every single glacier”, Farinotti added. “Currently, the Tian Shan is losing ice at a pace that is roughly twice the annual water of consumption entire Germany”. More importantly, though, this could result in the loss of valuable water resources supplied throughout central Asia and this, in turn, could then lead to fuel conflicts in that region.

This mountain range, which is about 1,500 miles long, contains about 33 percent of the ice found in the Himalayas and seven times more ice than the glaciers in the Alps.

Study co-author Doris Duethmann notes, “Glaciers are actually huge water stores”.

The pace of glacier retreat noticeably accelerated between the 1970s and the 1980s. If the growth remains at an average 3.6Fahrenheit per year from 2021 to 2050, the glaciers stand at high risk of losing around 50% of their mass within the next 35 years.

They also warn that with climate models predicting summer temperatures will continue to rise over the coming decades, the glaciers in this region will become increasingly vulnerable to melting. “This means that an increased temperature contributes to both increased melt and reduced glacier nourishment – and obviously, both contribute to glacier wastage”.