No more ice for Everest summit drinks
Agu 12, 2004 15: 29 EST
We have seen the effects of the global warming at ExplorersWeb. Only this past spring a Finn/French polar skier lost her life in the thinning ice of the North Pole, and a French polar skier had a very close call.
In later years, North Pole expeditions have started to swim to the North Pole. To bring a kayak and a dry suit is becoming as common as the regular sled and skis. Whilst early Arctic explorers sledded to the North Pole and back worrying mainly about ice ridges and rubble, modern explorers have had to adapt to a new obstacle - huge, open water leads.
We reported earlier that the warming is also affecting our mountains. And fast. It is estimated that only fifteen years from now, the snows of Kilimanjaro may exist only in old photographs. On Mount Everest, the glacier that ended at the base camp of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, has retreated 5 kilometers (3 miles) since their 1953 ascent.
Major sections of glaciers covering the Alps and the French and Spanish Pyrenees could be gone in the next few decades. Antarctica shrinks too - the Larsen Ice Shelf has shrunk to 40 percent of its previously stable size. Greenland; the Jakobshavn Glacier on the island's southwest coast is now thinning four times faster than during most of the twentieth century.
The melting is accelerating. Yao Tandong, a senior Chinese scientist said on Wednesday that while two-thirds of the total glaciers began shrinking in the 1950s to 1960s, still about 10 per cent of the glaciers in the Himalayan area advanced, and others remained unchanged. Now, the shrinkage of Asia's glaciers has intensified since the 1980s, and even more so in the 1990s, when all glaciers in the area were shrinking, including the glacier on Everest.
2004 Everest summiteer Annabelle Bond in her global warming outfit, image courtesy of Annabelle Bond.
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