According to a report in today's
Independent, which quotes the Chinese Academy of Science, the glaciers in Tibet are melting fast, and when the Tibetan glaciers are gone the great rivers of Asia will dry up. For the hundreds of millions of people depending on the Yangtze, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Yellow Rivers, the consequences will be severe.
Tibet contains 46,298 glaciers, "the world's largest area of ice outside the polar regions," and they have been receding over the past four decades. But now,
the process has accelerated alarmingly. Average temperatures in Tibet have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 20 years, causing the glaciers to shrink by 7 per cent a year, which means that they will halve every 10 years.
Chinese scientists predict that droughts and sandstorms will increase when the Tibetan tundra thaws and the plateau turns into desert. There have already been more sandstorms, thirteen of which hit northern China this year. One storm three weeks ago dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of dust on Beijing and reached Korea and Japan.
To quote the head of the academy's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Research Institute: "The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."