Study: Most Glaciers Near Mount Everest Will Disappear With Climate Change

Researchers say 5,500 glaciers in the region could disappear or drastically retreat by 2100.

The Khumbu Glacier at the Mount Everest Base Camp in NepalTashi Sherpa/AP


This story originally appeared on the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Most of the glaciers in the Mount Everest region will disappear or drastically retreat as temperatures increase with climate change over the next century, according to a group of international researchers.

The estimated 5,500 glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region—site of Mount Everest and many of the world’s tallest peaks—could reduce their volume by 70 to 99 percent by 2100, with dire consequences for farming and hydropower generation downstream, they said.

“The signal of future glacier change in the region is clear: continued and possibly accelerated mass loss from glaciers is likely, given the projected increase in temperatures,” said Joseph Shea, a glacier hydrologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal, and leader of the study published in The Cryosphere, the journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

The team studied glaciers in the Dudh Kosi basin in the Nepal Himalaya, which is home to some of the world’s highest mountain peaks, including Mount Everest, and to over 400 square kilometers of glacier area.

They concluded that the lower glaciers will melt fastest because the freezing level—the elevation where mean monthly temperature is 0 degrees Celsius—will rise higher up the mountains as air temperatures rise.

“The freezing level currently varies between 3,200 meters in January and 5,500 meters in August. Based on historical temperature measurements and projected warming to the year 2100, this could increase by 800 to 1,200 meters,” said study coauthor Walter Immerzeel of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

“Such an increase would not only reduce snow accumulations over the glaciers, but would also expose over 90 percent of the current glacierized area to melt in the warmer months,” said the authors.

There is still much uncertainty about how deeply levels of greenhouse gases will affect temperature, snowfall and rainfall, and very few of the region’s glaciers have been measured in detail. However, increasing rates of snow and ice melt are already observable and precipitation is expected to change from snow to rain at critical elevations, where glaciers are concentrated.

More than 1 billion people in Asia depend on rivers fed by glaciers for their food and livelihoods.

Farming and hydropower generation downstream of the Himalayan peaks is likely to be greatly affected. More than 1 billion people in Asia depend on rivers fed by glaciers for their food and livelihoods. While increased glacier melt initially increases water flows, ongoing retreat leads to reduced meltwater from the glaciers during the warmer months.

Glacier retreat, say the authors, can also result in the creation and growth of lakes dammed by glacial debris. Avalanches and earthquakes, similar to the one that devastated Everest base camp earlier this month, can breach the dams, causing catastrophic floods, says the paper.

The researchers caution that the new results should be seen as a first approximation to how Himalayan glaciers will react to increasing temperatures in the region.

“Our estimates need to be taken very cautiously, as considerable uncertainties remain,” said Patrick Wagnon, a glaciologist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Grenoble, France, and coauthor of the report.

A 2013 study, by a team led by a Nepali scientist at the University of Milan, found that some glaciers on or around Mount Everest had shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years with the snow line 180 meters higher than it was 50 years ago. The glaciers are disappearing faster every year, it said, with some smaller glaciers now only half the size they were in the 1960s.

The projected speed of glacier melt in the Himalayas has been disputed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) erroneously reported non-peer-reviewed science in 2009 which suggested that glaciers there were likely to disappear altogether by 2035. The IPCC confirmed that the paragraph should not have been included in the report and published an apology.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate