Mount Everest to become uncoated
By Li Qian (Chinadaily.com.cn)Updated: 2007-03-23 16:31
 A scene of the Mount Everest on the Tibetan Plateau. (file)  |
Mount Everest, world's highest peak, is facing the risk of being exposed uncoated in the sun as ice and snow covering the mountains continue to melt down in global warming, a recent report by the World Wildlife Fund warns.
At an occasion in Lhasa to celebrate World Meteorological Day, a picture is released in which much of the rock on the Jo-mo glang-ma peak could be seen uncoated.
The snow summit is showing a tendency of becoming a naked mountain, in a holistic recession of glaciers in Asia especially in the Himalaya Mountain area on which the Everest stands upright, Tibetan Autonomous Region Meteorological Bureau director Gao Yang said.
According to Gao, glaciers of the same volume as the yearly runoff of the Yellow River flow away every year from the Tibetan Plateau and bordering Asian mountains, one of the three most atmosphere-sensitive regions in the world. If the situation keeps going, a number of rivers in northwestern part of China will be in danger of running out, consequently withering away hursts alongside.
A Chinese Academy of Sciences investigation shows the area of glaciers in China has shrunk by seven percent in the past forty years, and predicts that most of country's glaciers will disappear by 2100.
More astonishingly, the World Wildlife Fund warns that global warming is accelerating ice and snow dissolving from Himalaya, which will result in a water crisis for hundreds of millions of people in China, India and Nepal in probably 20 years.
|
||
|
||
|
|