How Climate Scientists Can Save Lives by Predicting Glacial Collapse By Bob Berwyn
Some global warming
impacts, like sea level rise, creep up on you a millimeter at a time. But
others hit fast and hard, like a pair of 2016 avalanches in Tibet, when two giant
glaciers crumbled, unleashing walls of ice that raced downhill at 120
kilometers per hour.
The first of the two
avalanches, last July, killed nine yak herders along with scores of their
animals when it ran six kilometers down a slope of the Aru Mountains of the
Tibetan Plateau. A second avalanche, just 2.6 kilometers south and nearly as
big, broke loose last September. Each of the Tibet avalanches spread icy slurry
across across more than eight square kilometers, piling enough debris to fill
2,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That one such event
should occur is remarkable; two is unprecedented. The most likely
explanation for the Tibet avalanches, and the associated glacial collapse, is
climate change,” as University of Sheffield researcher Dave Petley wrote in an
American Geophysical Union blog post last year.
Researchers
describe these patterns as “a new kind of glacier collapse never documented
before.”
Learning how and why
the slides happened when they did has a very practical purpose. With enough
information, experts could provide early warning for future large-scale glacier
avalanches, potentially saving lives, according to French glaciologist Etienne Berthier, who spoke on April 25th at the European Geosciences Union
General Assembly in Vienna, presenting an abstract of ongoing research
into the Tibet avalanches.
“Other glaciers in the
same range farther north have also been surging recently, which is an early
warning sign. Could more such glaciers collapse in the future? We now have a
recipe for how such disasters can happen,” Berthier said… read more:
