Home to Mount Everest and many more of the world’s tallest peaks, the Himalayas rise up from the Ganges River north to the Tibetan Plateau. This iconic mountain range is also home to thousands of glaciers.
These rivers of ice provide valuable fresh water to surrounding regions. But the Himalayan glaciers are melting fast, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“This is the clearest picture yet of how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting over this time interval, and why,” Joshua Maurer, an earth scientist at Columbia University and lead author of the new paper, said in a press release.
Maurer and colleagues discovered Himalayan glaciers lost ice twice more quickly in the past few decades than they did between 1975 and 2000. That’s significant because ice loss from glaciers contributed more to sea level rise than ice sheets between 1993 and 2010, according to ...
