Himalayan glaciers doomed to disappear, a research says

Seventy percent of the glaciers are doomed to disappear during this century, if the current trends of global warming are not limited, said today a research published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

The total mass loss of glaciers that end in lakes in the Himalayas was underestimated by 6.5 percent.

That was the conclusion reached by a team of international researchers, consisting of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Graz University of Technology (Austria), St. Andrews University (UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (USA).

Glaciers are large masses of ice formed on the upper parts of mountains, located on the earth’s surface and slowly descending down the slope in the form of a tongue, and are closer to the poles than anywhere else in the world because they are formed in areas where more snow accumulates in winter than melts in summer.

Such icy mountains accumulate more than 75 percent of the fresh water on planet Earth and are indispensable elements in the water cycle, since they serve as reserves accumulated by precipitation.

They are also considered fundamental to regulate mountain ecosystems, while their most important characteristic is not that they are water, but part of the hydrological cycle, which is not exactly the same thing, the scientists explained.