EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

High Glacier Recession

Karola Pass Glacier
Tibet

Explanation:  This glacier is in trouble.  It is in a phase of rapid recession.  

Perhaps more accurately, the communities and villages that depend on its meltwaters for fresh water, fish habitat, and other uses, may soon be in trouble if the glacier continues its vanishing act.

Look at the main photo above.  Just 25 years ago, this valley was filled with the ice of this glacier.

We are at the spectacular Karola Pass between the cities of Nangartse and Gyantse in southern Tibet, southwest of the capital city of Lhasa, in the high Himalayas.  

And I mean high.  

Marker stones at the highway pullout note the elevation there as 5020 meters (16,470 feet), with the elevation of the mountain peak to be 7191 meters (23,593 feet).  (Standing by the marker, as my personal point of comparison I realize that I am a mile higher than the peak of the volcano Mount Hood back home in Oregon.)
  
  

 
Air is thin and oxygen is in short supply here.  Hiking at 5020 meters is a chore.  At this elevation, the standard barometric pressure is 56 kPa (419 mmHg), or, in other terms, there is only 55% of the oxygen as compared to sea level.  

Karola Pass Glacier, like many mountain glaciers, is sensitive to changing climates.  During the last glacial maximum, ice coverage was 2.69 times greater than at present, and fluctuated during short-term cooling and wet phases.  

  
As the ice recedes it lays bare a paleohistory of crushed rock beneath, known as moraines. 

Information:
      Liu, J., C. Yi, Y. Li, W. Bi, Q. Zhang, and G. Hu.  2017.  Glacial fluctuations around the Karola Pass, eastern Lhagoi Kangri Range, since the Last Glacial Maximum.  Journal of Quaternary Science 32(4):516-527.