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As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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As climate change continues to transform the planet, one of the first victims will be glaciers around the world.
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However, Central Asia’s Pamir Mountains have long resisted downward trends and have even continued to gain mass in the past.
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Ice cores retrieved from one of the region’s glaciers promise to tell us more about why these particular glaciers are so resistant to climate change, although recent research suggests this long-held resilience may be waning.
The loss of glaciers on inhabited continents is one of the most alarming indicators of man-made climate change. A new study is published in the journal natural climate change It is estimated that we are losing approximately 1,000 glaciers each year, and this number is likely to increase by mid-century. With every glacier that disappears, fragile ecosystems, freshwater sources, tourism revenue, and even ecosystems are lost. spiritual feeling.
While the steady loss of glaciers is an overwhelming global trend, for decades this inevitable retreat seemed to be the opposite in at least one region of the world. The Konchukulbashi high-altitude ice cap in the Pamir Mountains (also known as the “Roof of the World”) is located primarily in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan at an altitude of 5,810 meters (approximately 19,000 feet). While other glaciers around the world melt and disappear, this ice cap actually grown up size, scientists wanted to understand this unexpected elasticity.
Earlier this year, an international team of scientists traveled to the ice sheet and obtained two ice core samples that were at least 100 meters in length. The first core travels to an underground shelter in Antarctica called the Ice Memory Foundation, a protected repository of climate information for centuries to come. The other core is headed to the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, where professor Yoshinori Iizuka will analyze samples in an attempt to understand the anomalies of this special ice sheet.
“If we can understand the mechanisms behind the increase in ice volume there, then we might be able to apply it to all other glaciers around the world,” Iizuka said told AFP. “That may be too ambitious a claim. But I hope our research will ultimately help people.”
The mission was originally planned to extract samples from the famous Vanchi-Yach Glacier (formerly Fechenko Glacier), the longest surviving glacier outside the world’s polar regions, but the mission proved too difficult for helicopters to access the area. Kon-Chukurbashi is anything but second-rate, however, as countless layers of compressed dust will provide scientists with up to 30,000 years of information about past atmospheric conditions, snowfall and temperatures in one of the world’s least studied mountain ranges.
“We dug out the last ice core, which is really spectacular,” said Evan Myers, a glaciologist at the Universities of Friborg and Zurich in Switzerland, who was involved in the expedition. told AFP in a separate article. “It’s really yellow ice because there’s a lot of sediment in it. That’s a very good sign for us.”
Unfortunately, for many glaciers, including the Pamir region itself, any data obtained from the samples may come too late. Earlier this year, a study led by scientists from the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology showed that the Pamir region’s recent decline in snowfall was undermining its fabled resilience, even stating that “no matter which way we analyze the models, we will see an important turning point by 2018 at the latest” for the Kizilsu Glacier, another glacier in the Pamir Plateau.
It turns out that even the world’s last glacial refuges cannot withstand the rapid warming caused by man-made climate change.
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