Glaciers provide a frozen window on earth's climate over a span of thousands of years, but that window is closing and the climate history is vanishing as glaciers retreat under the assault of global warming.
"Glaciers are the most visible evidence of global warming," Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University said at a conference in Columbus this week.
For more than 30 years, Thompson and his team have been visiting tropical latitude glaciers in some of the most remote regions of the world. They have returned with hundreds ice cores from deep within ice fields that provide a picture of the climate and the environment over the millennia.
Ice cores contain evidence of virtually everything that has entered the atmosphere, including volcanic ash and depositions of dust (which can indicate periods of prolonged drought), and provide temperature and precipitation records.
They are "ideal for revealing rapid climate change," Thompson said, and how natural systems have respond to such changes.
Thompson has extracted ice-core records from Mt. Kilimanjaro going back 11,000 years. But the snows and glaciers of M t. Kilimanjaro are in rapid retreat. Peru's Qori Kalis glacier had been retreating about 6 meters/year and is now shrinking 10 times as fast.
The loss of glaciers will affect 2-3 billion people, Thompson said. He noted that the major rivers of the Himalayas are fed by glaciers that store about 12,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater. The loss of glaciers threatens water supplies, hydroelectric power production and crop irrigation. And glacial melt is also a precursor to massive to sea level rise, Thomson said.
Humanity will have adapt to the consequences of glacier melt and devote scarce resources "to do what glaciers do for free," such as store water, and find alternative energy sources to hydro, he said.
"If you lose the ability to understand the climate system, you lose the ability to understand what is abnormal or normal in climate," Thompson said. "If you don't understand the past, you don't understand the future."
Intelligent idiots like this one try to convince people that we cause global warming and must change our lifestyly Let them try to change the effect of the Sun on our planet.
Phil - It never ceases to amaze me why some people think that insults are a credible and effective way to make their point. I don't have a clue about your lifestyle, but if we continue to abuse the environment, in a host of ways, it may not be sustainable. By the way, Lonnie Thompson is one of the world's foremost authorities on paleoclimatology and glaciology and needs no defense from me.