The towering peaks of Mount Everest and Mount Godwin-Austen (K2) are in the frozen Hindu Kush and Himalayan ranges. The snow and ice that challenge the most experienced mountaineers are synonymous with their awesome beauty. Yet beneath that thin veneer there lurks the climate crisis you probably do not know about.
A Fifth of World Population Threatened by a New Climate Crisis
The glaciers in these mountain ranges feed ten of the most important rivers including Ganges, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy. These are critical to the survival of 250 million people living across eight different countries.
However, if a third of the ice were to melt under pressure from global warming, this would cause cataclysmic flooding. A total 1.65 billion people would face devastation across a 2,000 mile-wide swath. The worst affected people would be living in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan. Most are already among the poorest people in the world and unaware of the looming climate crisis.
This is the Climate Crisis You Haven’t Heard Of
“This is the looming natural disaster you haven’t heard of.” So says Philippus Wester of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) who headed the study that revealed it.
One third of the ice could vanish if the temperature became 1.5C warmer than before the industrial revolution. Those ice fields could turn to bare rocks in less than a century because of rising temperatures, say scientists. The polluted air comes from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, one of the world’s most polluted regions.
Moreover the air deposits black carbon and dust that accelerate the melt. If global temperatures rise by 2C by the turn of the current century, then half the glaciers will vanish. Most likely this will be forever.
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Preview Image: Courtesy Google Earth
