Glacier Meltdown
Note - The stories on this page will no longer be designed to
wake people up and stop the death of the Mother. It is too late for that. From now on I will be reporting on the rapid breakdown
of our environment and the death of the planet that sustains all life. We have killed her. The extinction of all life is inevitable.
A recent Reuters report noted that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, the largest of its kind in the Arctic, has broken up. A freshwater lake within the shelf, located on the north
coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, is now draining into the sea. Massive ice blocks are breaking away
and are expected to soon be a threat to navigation.
The breakup of the Arctic ice is caused by a warming Earth, scientists say. A similar phenomenon
has been causing the break-up of large ice shelves in the Antarctic as well.
At the Ward Hunt shelf, records indicate an increase of four-tenths of a degree centigrade every
10 years since 1967. The average July temperature has been 1.3 degrees Celsius or 34 degrees Farenheit -- just above the freezing
point -- since 1967.
In Montana, scientists are looking with alarm at the retreat of the famous glaciers that comprise
Glacier National Park at the Continental Divide. Blase Reardon, a biological science technician with U. S. Geological Survey,
says the glaciers are fragmenting and melting so quickly that he believes they will be gone within the next 30 years.
The meltdown is happening all over the Earth says geologist Rick Wessels, part of an international
team monitoring glacier activity from the Space (GLIMS) project. After only seven months of monitoring, Wessels has seen melting
everywhere. He says this provides solid evidence for global warming.
In Nepal and Bhutan, a scientific group is warning that dozens of mountain lakes are so swollen
from melting glaciers that they warn of massive flooding that could destroy many Himalayan towns in the glacier shadows.
Scientists from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya,
along with remote-sensing experts from the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Katmandu,
Nepal, participated in the study.
They warn that within the next few years, floods from melting ice and snowfields could threaten
the lives of tens of thousands of people who live high in the mountains and in downstream communities. They say mud walls
of these lakes could collapse under the pressure of the extra water.
"Our findings indicate that 20 glacial lakes in Nepal and 24 in Bhutan have become potentially dangerous
as a result of climate change," said Surendra Shrestha, Asian regional coordinator of the UNEP's Division of Early Warning
and Assessment, which is based in Bangkok, Thailand.
The researchers say that the 44 lakes they identified as potentially dangerous is a conservative
estimate of the number of lakes that may pose a serious threat.
"These are the ones we know about," said Shrestha. "Who knows how many others, elsewhere in the
Himalayas and across the world, are in a similar critical state?"
