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Rapidly melting glaciers portend doom

London: Eleven bearded Victorian gentlemen gathered at a London hotel on December 22, 1857, to found the world’s first mountaineering association, the Alpine Club. As artist John Ruskin, an early member of the club, famously put it: “Mountains are the beginning and end of all mountain scenery . . . the cathedrals of the Earth.”

The pleasure and intense enjoyment they got from mountains lives on but the cathedrals are crumbling. Now, more than ever, mountains matter. They are the ultimate litmus test — the most immediate, graphic indicator of what is happening to the Earth’s climate.

By 1975, that volume of ice had halved. But what is remarkable is the speed of melting. A further 25 per cent of ice melted between 1975 and 2000, and an even faster 10-15 per cent in the first five years of this century.

More serious is the melting of permafrost, the subterranean glue that has cemented apparently solid structures for centuries. The shattering of our playground would not matter if it were not such a clear demonstration of bigger concerns — both the alarming speed of the current warming worldwide and the specific threat to mountain communities threatened by destabilised mountain slopes. Of course, mountain landscapes — particularly young mountain ranges such as the Alps, Himalayas and Andes — are inherently unstable, but the instability threatens to become much more acute. In Nepal, the speeding retreat of glaciers is producing ever more menacing meltwater lakes.

In the case of some rivers, such as the Niger and Nile, about 90 per cent of the flow derives from mountains. The Punjab — the bread bowl of northern India and Pakistan — is named after the five rivers that all rise in the Himalayas close to that holy mountain, Kailash, revered by Hindus and Buddhists.

Bruno Messerli, a leading geographer from Berne, suggests that 1.5 billion people in China and south-east Asia get their water from the Himalayan ranges.

The figures may be imprecise but the general implication is clear: mountains matter, not just as a place of escape, but as the very source of life. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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