Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau might become more unstable and could cause more disasters.
“Over the past 60 years, the glacier area on the Tibetan Plateau has shrunk by around 24 per cent, with around 7,000 small glaciers disappearing,” Gao Rong, deputy director of China’s National Climate Centre, said earlier this month. He said glacial disasters would likely become more frequent.
This warning came after last month’s deadly landslide on the China-Nepal border. It was caused by a falling glacier.
A study was published by the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with other institutions. It found that downstream erosion played a big role in the damage.
When ice and rocks collapsed, they slid down the valley, scraped the riverbed, pulled debris from the banks and mixed with the water. This turned a collapse into a mudslide. Scientists stress the need to improve risk assessment and monitoring systems.
