Yeah, he'll fix it!........
Posted on 02/16/2007 6:08:30 AM PST by Abathar
The principal glacier of the world’s biggest tropical ice-cap could disappear within five years as a result of global warming, one of the world’s leading glaciologists predicted yesterday.
The imminent demise of the Qori Kalis glacier, the main component of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, offers the starkest evidence yet of the effects of climate change, according to Lonnie Thompson, of Ohio State University.
Although scientists have known for decades that Qori Kalis and the other Quelccaya glaciers are melting, new observations indicate that the rate of retreat is increasing, Professor Thompson said. When he visits this summer, he expects to find that the glacier has halved in size since last year, and he believes that Qori Kalis will be gone within five years.
“This widespread retreat of mountain glaciers may be our clearest evidence of global warming as they integrate many climate variables,” Professor Thompson told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Francisco. “Most importantly, they have no political agenda.”
The Quelccaya ice-cap, covering 17 square miles (44 sq km) in the Cordillera Oriental region of the Peruvian Andes, is the world’s largest tropical ice mass. Qori Kalis, its biggest glacier, has receded by at least 0.6 miles (1.1km) since 1963, when the first formal measurements were made from aerial photographs. The rate of retreat has increased: between 1963 and 1978, it shrank by 6.5 yards (6m) a year, a rate that has now risen tenfold to 65 yards annually.
Professor Thompson predicted six years ago that the celebrated snows of Kilimanjaro would be gone from Africa’s highest mountain by 2015, and he now thinks that that estimate may have been too conservative. He said: “Tropical glaciers are the canaries in the coalmine for our global climate system, as they integrate and respond to most of the key climatological variables — temperature, precipitation, cloudiness, humidity and radiation.”
A critical piece of evidence from almost fifty scientific expeditions to seven shrinking tropical ice-caps points to global warming as the reason for their decline. In all but one case, snowfall has increased as ice volume has fallen. More snow should mean advancing glaciers, unless rising temperatures are melting the extra precipitation and the ice tongues themselves.
In the Andes they are getting more snow than usual, theories are that the snow is insulating the ice and not allowing it to freeze as deep as it normally would. This again points to percipitation as the main cause, not temperatures. Due to the fact that these things are cyclic, over hundreds of years, (a blink of the eye to the earth) and that there are places where the exact opposite is happeneing this is not a global event but just a local event caused by normal weather patterns.
If it melts, it will be the "Not So Great Andean Glacier", right?
Alll that lovely freshwater - they better build a resevoir and some aquaducts to catch as much of it as possible!.
SLIP AND SLIDE!
SLIP AND SLIDE!
The principal glacier of the world’s biggest tropical ice-cap could disappear within five years as a result of global warming, one of the world’s leading glaciologists predicted yesterday.
This is supposed to be a bad thing?
HELLLO! We're still coming out of the last ice age, this is what happenes when ice ages end.
in a word, yes..
I call it the 'snowman theory' . Up here in wisconsin we build snowmen. When the weather warms, they start to melt. As they get smaller, they melt faster. It has nothing to do with global warming, rather it is there is less mass of snow to maintain the cold, so as it shrinks, it melts faster.
It killed my father, and beat my mother!
Good, only if that means the right and left coasts of the U.S. go underwater. That would "kill" the democrat base and the survivors would have to live in "fly over country" and be confronted with reality and de-programmed by their new friends and neighbors.
Maybe its not melting, maybe they are chopping it up into icecubes to cool off due to the GLOBAL WARMING.
Finally! I cant wait to have the great Andean Valley back to normal.
Lets see more fresh water and warmer climates..why is this a bad thing?
What's the big deal? So what if the glaciers melt? It's not like it's never happened before. Glaciers come and go as time marches on. The whole northern hemisphere was once covered by a glacier a mile thick!.............
Send them a Ice Cube!
SHHHH!.....that's where Atlantis and the Space people live!.......
I wonder if those glaciers were there when Greenland was a lush farming area inhabited by the Vikings between 1000 & 1300 AD? Or did the glaciers come to the tropic with the mini-ice age that started in 1300?
Yeah, he'll fix it!........
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