Tibetan glaciers rapidly melting

Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply. Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7200 metres above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming. But just the opposite is proving true, according to new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Professor Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State Universityand a team of researchers travelled to central Himalayas in 2006 to study the Naimona’nyi glacier, expecting to find some melting. … "At the highest elevations, we’re seeing something like an average of 0.3°C warming per decade," says Thompson. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects 3°C of warming by 2100. But that’s at the surface; up at the elevations where these glaciers are there could be almost twice as much, almost 6°C."