Study finds ice retreat on Mount Everest
Mount Everest has lost significant amounts of ice over the last 89 years, according to a group that recently travelled to Everest to take exactly the same picture that another explorer did in 1921.
George Malloy, a British adventurer and amateur photographer, travelled to Mount Everest in 1921 and took a picture of the mountain that showed a thick S-shaped band of ice curving down a valley.
A picture taken in exactly the same place 89 years later by the Asia Society (AS) shows that the ice has retreated significantly.
“The photographs reveal a startling truth: the ice of the Himalaya is disappearing,” a statement by the group says, adding that the findings are vitally important because the Himalayas are home to the largest sub-polar ice reserves in the world.
The melt runoff from these reserves feed into the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which the statement says are home to hundreds of millions of people whose existence may be threatened if the ice-loss changes the flow of the rivers, thereby destroying their livelihoods.
The findings are part of a series of photographs taken by the group, a then-and-now type look at glaciers in Tibet, Nepal as well as K2 in Pakistan, all of them are said to be in retreat.
Source:Europe News.Net
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