Risan Project Blog

Record Everest climber treks around Nepal to warn villagers of flood risks as Himalayas warm

cathymoo — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:00:28 +0000

Apa Sherpa during 20th summit of Everest in 2010 (Photo courtesy Apa Sherpa)

(By Associated Press, Published: March 2, 2012)

TATOPANI, Nepal — Before Apa became a legendary Sherpa mountaineer, he was a humble Himalayan potato farmer who worked his fields in the Everest foothills until, without warning, raging floodwaters swallowed his farm.

The flash flood — unleashed when a mountain lake fed by melting glacier waters burst its banks — destroyed homes, bridges and a hydroelectric plant. Apa scrambled up a hill, but at least five neighbors were swept away.

Twenty-six years later, after scaling the world’s highest mountain a record 21 times, Apa is on a quest to draw attention to the danger of more devastating floods as glacial melt caused by climate change fills mountain lakes to the bursting point.

The 51-year-old Apa, who like most Sherpas uses only one name, is trekking the length of Nepal to warn villagers to prepare themselves for change. A third of the way along his 120-day journey, he has already seen many lakes that look ready to spill.

“If it happens again, many villages would be washed away and lives lost,” he said during a break in his trek in Tatopani, a resort village near the Tibet border.

Chances are, it will happen again.

There are now thousands of such lakes transforming Himalayan foothills and waterways into extreme danger zones for some of the millions of people in seven countries abutting the massive mountain range.

In Nepal alone, at least 20 of the more than 2,300 glacial lakes are in danger of bursting banks made mostly of rock and scree held together by little more than gravity. Across the wider mountain range, dozens more are building to dangerous levels as temperatures rise and ice melts quicker.

Near Apa’s old home lies Imza Lake, which he used to circle along a track skirting the water’s edge. The trails have long since disappeared underwater.

“Because of the atmospheric warming, most of the lakes are growing very fast,” said Pradeep Mool, an expert in satellite imaging who works assessing glacial melt for the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development based in Nepal’s capital, Katmandu.

Global temperatures went up 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) during the 20th century, leading into the warmest decade ever recorded in 2000-2009.

“The global community does not seem to understand the problem. The politicians, the media, the scientific communities, they are speaking in different languages about climate change,” Mool said. “But saving these local communities, their lives and their property, should be a primary concern for everyone.”

In 1998, a flood triggered by an ice avalanche that hit Tam Pokhara Lake, south of Everest, killed two people and destroyed six bridges as it cascaded down a riverbed. Seven years earlier, one person was killed when a moraine collapsed into Chuberi Lake northeast of Katmandu, and a 1981 flood unleashed from a Tibetan lake killed at least five people in Nepal.

The midday flood that took Apa’s farm in 1985 left his village of Thame without power and bridges, cutting it off from neighboring towns, markets and schools.

“I was really lucky to have survived,” Apa said. “If it had been at night, we could have been swept away while we were all asleep.” Having to provide for his family, he began carrying tourists’ luggage up the mountains that rose from his backyard. He worked as a porter and then a mountain guide, summiting Everest for the first time in 1989 with a team that included Everest pioneer Edmund Hillary’s son, Peter.

Apa has repeated the feat 20 times since, earning the nickname “Super Sherpa” within the mountaineering community. But every year, it gets more dangerous as the snow and ice that once covered the path melt and shift to reveal loose rock and deep crevasses.

The trekking industry gave Apa a new chance in life, and “I hope the same can happen for the people in other parts of the Himalayan region,” he said.

Apa and his team of climbers and environmentalists are now offering advice to villagers on coping with floods as they trek the 1,060-mile (1,700-kilometer) Nepal stretch of the “Great Himalayan Trail.”

They are asking for help in measuring water levels, and advising those along dangerous waterways to move.

The truth is there is little that poor mountain dwellers can do about the dangers but wait, pray — and if the water breaks — run.

Some communities have installed alarm systems, but they give only a few minutes warning that a flood is on the way, and most villages are too remote for rescue in an emergency.

The lakes themselves cannot all be drained. They are at altitudes too high for heavy machinery to move rocks and carve canals. Some settlements facing imminent flood threat are sending workers uphill into thin air to dig drainage canals with their hands and shovels in hopes of channeling the water away.

Many of the locals are simply too poor to move away from riverbeds, or find leaving their ancestral homeland too painful a prospect. They also need the water for crops and cooking. And the tourists they hope to serve with tea, souvenirs and accommodation travel mostly along roads that line rivers.

It is the Himalayan communities on southern slopes that are most vulnerable, said environmentalist Anil Chitrakar, who helped organize Apa’s trek.

“They are the front line to the mountains,” Chitrakar said. People living there “have to be more resilient … and will have to adapt a way of life that prepares them for change.”

And for locals who stay, there is work to be done, Apa said. New trails must be built for the increasing number of Western tourists, or else the traditional paths to Mount Everest and Annapurna will badly degrade.

Scientists also need new trails to access remote areas and measure lakes and glaciers now out of reach.

“We need to act now and not wait for outside help,” said Apa, who since 2006 has lived in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. He says tourism is the region’s best chance for the future.

“Once the tourists come, they will provide these villagers with employment and source of income.”

Katy Daigle reported from New Delhi. Follow Daigle on Twitter at http://twitter.com/katydaigle and Gurubacharya at http://twitter.com/Binaj_APNepal.

Vatican Science Panel Calls Attention to the Threat of Glacial Melt

cathymoo — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:27:45 +0000

Main Rongbuk Glacier, Mt. Everest, 8848 m, Tibet Autonomous Region

Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene: A Report by the Working Group Commissioned by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Last year, the Vatican sponsored an interesting and quite comprehensive report on the effect of climate change on mountain glaciers in the Anthropocene. The report is the work of a group of glaciologists, climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, physicists, chemists, mountaineers, and lawyers from all over the world. Co-chaired by Scripps Climate and Atmospheric Scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan (a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 2004), Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, formerly affiliated with Scripps, and Laurent Bengtsson, former head of the European weather forecasting center, the group also included Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia, former director general of the CERN Laboratory. Among the rest of the 24 authors are Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, Wilfried Haeberli from Switzerland, Georg Kaser from Austria and Anil Kulkarni from India, considered among the world’s foremost experts on glacial change. Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, report authors met at the Vatican in early April, 2011, to contemplate the observed retreat of the mountain glaciers, its causes and consequences.

“We call on all people and nations to recognise the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, and by changes in forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other land uses. We appeal to all nations to develop and implement, without delay, effective and fair policies to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change on communities and ecosystems, including mountain glaciers and their watersheds, aware that we all live in the same home. By acting now, in the spirit of common but differentiated responsibility, we accept our duty to one another and to the stewardship of a planet blessed with the gift of life. We are committed to ensuring that all inhabitants of this planet receive their daily bread, fresh air to breathe and clean water to drink as we are aware that, if we want justice and peace, we must protect the habitat that sustains us. The believers among us ask God to grant us this wish.”

Morteratsch glacier (Alps). Courtesy of J. Alean, SwissEduc

The co-authors of “Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene” list numerous examples of glacial decline around the world and the evidence linking that decline to human-caused changes in climate and air pollution. The threat to the ways of life of people dependent upon glaciers and snow packs for water supplies compels immediate action to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to what changes are happening now and are projected to happen in the future.

Three Recommended Measures

The report cautions against a “business-as-usual mode” when it comes to a sustainable future and the continued extraction of coal, oil, and gas. It then goes on to urge society at large to:

“Reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions without delay, using all means possible…”
“Reduce the concentrations of warming air pollutants…by as much as 50%”
“Prepare to adapt to the climatic changes, both chronic and abrupt, that society will be unable to mitigate”

And their final summary statement really drives the point home: “The cost of the three recommended measures pales in comparison to the price the world will pay if we fail to act now.”

Read the entire report here including specific findings and recommendations. It’s quite fascinating and enlightening, especially coming from what some might characterize as an unlikely source.

About the Anthropocene

“Aggressive exploitation of fossil fuels and other natural resources has damaged the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we inhabit. To give one example, some 1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other climatically important “greenhouse” gases have been pumped into the atmosphere. As a result, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air now exceeds the highest levels of the last 800,000 years. The climatic and ecological impacts of this human interference with the Earth System are expected to last for many millennia, warranting a new name, The Anthropocene, for the new “man-made” geologic epoch we are living in.”

Arctic sea ice reaches minimum 2011 extent, the second lowest in the satellite record

cathymoo — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:55:40 +0000

The blanket of sea ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean appears to have reached its lowest extent for 2011, the second lowest recorded since satellites began measuring it in 1979, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Arctic sea ice extent fell to 1.67 million square miles, or 4.33 million square kilometers on Sept. 9, 2011. This year’s minimum of 1.67 million square miles is more than 1 million square miles below the 1979-2000 monthly average extent for September — an area larger than Texas and California combined.

While this year’s September minimum extent was greater than the all-time low in 2007, it remains significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, according to scientists involved in the analysis. Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases pumped into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Every summer that we see a very low ice extent in September sets us up for a similar situation the following year,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geography department. “The Arctic sea ice cover is so thin now compared to 30 years ago that it just can’t take a hit anymore. This overall pattern of thinning ice in the Arctic in recent decades is really starting to catch up with us.”

Serreze said that in 2007, the year of record low Arctic sea ice, there was a “nearly perfect” set-up of specific weather conditions. Winds pushed in more warm air over the Arctic than usual, helping to melt sea ice, and winds also pushed the floating ice chunks together into a smaller area. “It is interesting that this year, the second lowest sea ice extent ever recorded, that we didn’t see that kind of weather pattern at all,” he said.

The last five years have been the five lowest Arctic sea ice extents recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979, said CU-Boulder’s Walt Meier, an NSIDC scientist. “The primary driver of these low sea ice conditions is rising temperatures in the Arctic, and we definitely are heading in the direction of ice-free summers,” he said. “Our best estimates now indicate that may occur by about 2030 or 2040.”

There still is a chance the sea ice extent could fall slightly due to changing winds or late season melt, said Meier. During the first week of October, CU-Boulder’s NSIDC will issue a full analysis of the 2011 results and a comparison to previous years.

NSIDC is part of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences — a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration headquartered on the CU campus — and is funded primarily by NASA.

NSIDC’s sea ice data come from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder sensor on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program F17 satellite using methods developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For more information and graphics visit CU-Boulder’s NSIDC website at nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2011/091511.html.

James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss

cathymoo — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:49:48 +0000

Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change.