What are the hallmarks of global warming? You might think of polar bears starving and skinny, flocking to human communities to rummage through trash cans, or Giant icebergs of Antarctic Songdo and Thwaites that are collapsing and embarking on a wandering journey.
But now, at Mount Everest on the Tibetan Plateau, the third pole of the planet after the North and Antarctic, another landmark event of warming has emerged – the glaciers of the South Mount Everest, which formed only 2000 years ago, have melted in 25 years. This means that human-caused climate change has reached the highest point on earth, disrupting the key balance of the earth's third pole, and Mount Everest has become increasingly dangerous.
The study came from a team of scientists and climbers at the University of Maine who visited the South Pass Glacier on Mount Everest in 2019, drilled a 10-meter-long ice core and set up two of the world's tallest automated weather stations to collect data.
The study left three records in the Guinness Book of World Records, one was to drill the highest ice core (8020 meters); the other was to find the highest microplastic on land (8440 meters) – possibly from clothing or tents; and the third was to build the highest altitude on land, located in the "dead zone" weather station (8,430 meters).
Through the study of ice core samples and weather station data, scientists found that after the ice layer of the South Pass Glacier was exposed, it had lost 55 meters of ice in 25 years; the South Pass Glacier also changed from snow accumulation to ice, a change that may have begun in the 1950s.
The consequences of this change are obvious, the glacier's transition from snow to ice makes it impossible to reflect radiation from the sun, under strong sunlight, under the combined effect of relative humidity and strong winds, the rate of ice melting in the region has soared more than 20 times, and glacier loss has become particularly intense since the 1990s.
We cannot but lament that 150 years of additional carbon dioxide emissions have trapped too much energy in the planet's lower atmosphere, and the three lowest poles of the Earth's temperature have begun to collapse.
The melting of arctic and antarctic glaciers will raise sea levels, flooding the world's richest coastal areas, causing sea-view houses to become sea-in-sea houses and seabed houses, while the melting of glaciers on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau will lead to landslides, floods and mudslides in this already unstable young region.
In 2013, devastating flash floods and landslides broke out in the Indian states of Himachal pradesh and Uttarakhand, killing more than 5,000 people from rolling floods and debris, and the missing people are uncountable. In February last year, the South Dadevi Glacier in India's Uttarakhand state partially collapsed, and a large amount of rock rushed into the valley floor, setting off a huge current that washed away two hydroelectric dams under construction, killing more than 20 workers and missing 125 people.
Even more frightening is the fact that the glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau, which affect the livelihoods of 1.6 billion Asian people, will gradually dry up the water sources they drink and irrigate after the glaciers melt, and the hydropower plants will be reduced to ruins; and the highly toxic pesticides used decades ago, such as DDT and perfluoroalkyl acid, which have been frozen in the glaciers as ice and snow are deposited, will also re-enter the food chain, leading to even greater disasters that are now unforeseeable.
The most frightening thing is that not only the glaciers of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, but also the land glaciers in other parts of the world, and the large area of permafrost in the Arctic Circle are also thawing, which will release a large amount of carbon dioxide and methane, as well as the prehistoric viruses and pathogens that have been frozen, and what kind of impact it will bring is still basically a blank, and no one can predict.
As extreme weather continues to intensify, not only Mount Everest is dangerous, but most parts of the entire planet are in danger, the balance of thousands or even tens of thousands of years is broken, and we, including all life, may only have a few decades to adapt, and what the future holds, only God knows!
The study, published Feb. 3 in the journal Natural Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, was titled:
Mt. Everest’s highest glacier is a sentinel for accelerating ice loss