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China’s melting glacier draws tourists amid climate worries
Impact of climate change on Bashui glacier
- More projectiles were tumbling down the hulk of ice that scientists say is one of the world’s fastest melting glaciers.
- Chen hiked away and onto a barren landscape once buried beneath the glacier.
- Millions of people each year are drawn to Baishui’s frosty beauty on the southeastern edge of the Third Pole.(a region in Central Asia with the world’s third largest store of ice after Antarctica and Greenland that’s roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined. )
- Third Pole glaciers are vital to billions of people from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
- Asia’s 10 largest rivers — including the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, and Ganges — are fed by seasonal melting.
- Depending on how it melts, a lot of the freshwater will be leaving the region for the ocean, which will have severe impacts on water and food security
- The glacier has lost 60% of its mass and shrunk 250 m since 1982, according to a 2018 report in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
- Scientists found in 2015 that 82% of glaciers surveyed in China had retreated.
- They warned that the effects of glacier melting on water resources are gradually becoming “increasingly serious” for China.
Source
The Hindu