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Climate change tour in Tibet

 

Laura Barnhart is studying climate change in China.

Laura Barnhart is a woman in the know when it comes to climate change in China. She is a young US researcher working with a Chinese science team investigating climate change here.

She is currently on a research tour of Tibet.

Over the next few months or so, Laura will be telling Greenpeace China the latest news climate-wise from the Himalayas.

Read about Greenpeace China's climate change Tibet tour (2007).

Tibetan tsunami

Sea level rise and flooding associated with climate change might motivate some to head for the hills.

But what happens when the floods come from above?

That’s what happens in a GLOF.

A GLOF? What on earth is a GLOF?

GLOF is a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood. 

Capped with glaciers whose melt waters feed the Yellow, Yangtze, Brahmaputra, Tarim, Mekong, Salween, and Ganges rivers, the Tibetan Plateau has been named the “water tower of Asia.”

As temperatures rise globally, glaciers across the plateau are wasting away.

Read about Greenpeace China's Himalayan glacial melt action (the big Beijing melt).

With little to no accumulation to recharge glaciers, Asia’s water tower is gradually draining to the oceans.

While water scarcity could leave some of Asia’s most densely populated areas high and dry in the next century, a more immediate problem of a water excess is adding insult to injury.

As glaciers melt, their melt water pools in glacial lakes that dam naturally. 

Usually these lakes remain relatively balanced with input from the glacier and evaporation.

But, with rising temperatures across the plateau, most lakes are filling at unprecedented rates, and even expanding to join adjacent lakes. 

This situation has created a group of precariously balanced glacial lakes, teetering on overflow. 

A sudden heat pulse, an earthquake, an avalanche, a landslide, or other disruptive events, can rupture the dams resulting in a GLOF, which send a destructive inland tsunami of icy debris filled water surging down inhabited valleys. 

Instead of a slow, monitored draining of Asia’s water tower, GLOFs are equivalent to toppling the tower.

One of China’s most infamous GLOFs occurred at Sangwang Lake in 1954 when 300 million cubic meters of debris filled water flash flooded the Nianchu River valley.  The flow buried the valley 3-5 meters thick in debris.  An estimated 691 people lost their lives and 16,000 more lost crops, land, houses, and livestock.

Chinese, Nepalese, and Indian scientists are collaborating to identify and monitor hazardous lakes through remote sensing and on site observation methods. 

NGO’s and local governments have established early warning systems for some lakes and have plans to drain others. 

Yet, while short term projects will save lives and infrastructure, larger challenges lie ahead. 

The sobering possibility of the last piece of Tibetan Plateau ice melting, raging through mountain streams, gliding down the Yangtze, and dumping into the East China Sea will keep policy makers and scientists alike scrambling to protect Asia’s most crucial freshwater resource.

 

The Tibet tour route


We will get acclimated in Lhasa and then make a loop visiting field research locations with an eye on glacial retreat, lake and grassland changes, and general climate monitoring.

The first destination is to Namco Lake, northwest of Lhasa.

This location is popular for scientific studies for monitoring overall climatic variations on the plateau.

For example, many of the numbers concerning this decade’s temperature increase on the plateau come out of this station.

Next we will travel south to another field station nestled below Mount Qomalangma (Everest), on the border with Nepal.

So stay tuned for blog posts when I return to the lowlands with expanded perspective, and lung capacity to boot!

A little introduction


My interest in climate change started in the basement of my university geology building where I spent most of my second year listening to Neil Young live recordings, eyes tight to a microscope, tediously counting and measuring tree rings of hemlock trees from Alaska.

When my eyes blurred and crossed, I would sit back and conceptually zoom out from the tedium before me.

Those tree rings were like tiny annual folders in a filing cabinet of centuries of Alaskan temperatures.

Those records would eventually be stacked up with other ‘proxy’ climate records to patch together a picture of past and present global climate.

That patchwork would eventually be added to a modeled image and included in a report for policy makers somewhere down the line.

Reassured, I would lean forward, zoom into the tree-rings and tune out to “Cinnamon Girl.”

My summer jobs took me to the arid American West where I hacked on smoke and dug fire line as a wildland firefighter.

As I sweated away in the charred forests of Idaho, I had the realisation that not all places on Earth were created equal.

I learned that as global temperatures rise, areas like the American West, Western China, and Sub-Saharan Africa, will experience (and are already experiencing) droughts, wildfires, water shortages, crop shortages, population migrations, and general social unrest.

Climate change will hit some places and populations harder than others.

For me, this is the most practical reason for paying attention to climate science and policy, as climate dictates where and how we can expect to live in the future. 

After a stint in Washington D.C. where I cringed as scientists and politicians argued about the relevance of bubbles in ice-cores to international climate policy, my interests turned global and took me to China where I’ve been on a steep learning curve for over two years.

I am overwhelmed by China’s geographical size, cultural complexity, and environmental uncertainty.  

The effects of China’s rapid development pervade both the global atmosphere and the global economy, making all of China’s environmental policies relevant worldwide.

I am currently working at a climate research institute in Beijing learning more about ice-cores, black carbon, retreating glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, water resources, and glacial lake outburst floods.

I look forward to sharing my insights during this Countdown to Copenhagen. 

Return to Countdown to Copenhagen home page.