Posted on 07/16/2010 2:11:05 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK (AFP) – When British climbing legend George Mallory took his iconic 1921 photo of Mount Everest's north face, the mighty, river-shaped glacier snaking under his feet seemed eternal.
Decades of pollution and global warming later, modern mountaineer David Breashears has reshot the picture at the same spot -- and proved an alarming reality.
Instead of the powerful, white, S-shaped sweep of ice witnessed by Mallory before he died on his conquest of Everest, the Main Rongbuk Glacier today is shrunken and withered.
The frozen waves of ice pinnacles -- many .. the size of office buildings -- are still there. But they are far fewer, lower and confined to a narrow line.
Comparing precisely matched photographs, Breashears determined that the Rongbuk had dropped some 320 feet (97 meters) in depth.
"The melt rate in this region of central and eastern Himalaya is extreme and is devastating," Breashears said Wednesday at New York's Asia Society, which is hosting the exhibition July 13 to August 15.
Amid bad-tempered political debates over the causes and reality of global warming, Breashears speaks literally from the ground.
He went in the footsteps of three great early mountaineer-photographers: Mallory, Canadian-born mapping pioneer Edward Wheeler, and Italy's Vittorio Sella, whose work spanned the 19th and 20th centuries.
The result is then-and-now sets from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan showing seven glaciers in retreat -- not only much diminished, but in one case having dissolved into a lake.
"If this isn't evidence of the glaciers in serious decline, I don't know what is," the soft-spoken Breashears said.
...
Himalayan glaciers are the world's third largest reserve of ice after the north and south poles, and their seasonal melt water is a crucial source for Asia's great rivers, including the Ganges, Indus, Mekong and Yellow.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Maybe some of the hundreds and thousands of missing climbers will wash out.
Man set foot in Ice-Age Tibet
CNN Hong Kong | April 17, 2002 | Nick Easen
Posted on 06/14/2018 12:22:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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