According to a new study, based on recently declassified Cold War-era satellite imagery, Himalayan glaciers are melting twice as fast now as they were before the turn of the century.
It is also threatening water supplies for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia.
The scientists gathered 40 years of satellite observations spanning 2,000 kilometres across India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan and found that the glaciers have been losing the equivalent of a foot-and-half of ice each year since 2000.
The figure has almost doubled the amount of melting that took place from 1975 to 2000. The temperatures vary from place to place, the average temperatures were a degree Celsius higher between 2000 to 2016 than they were between 1975 and 2000.
Also, there have been other factors that can be blamed like changes in rainfall, with reductions tending to reduce ice cover, and the burning of fossil fuels which lead to soot that lands on snowy glacier surfaces, absorbing sunlight and is quickly melting.
A lead author also mentioned that if no efforts are being done to curtail the impact of global warming, then Greenland will melt too.
Image Credit: RTE
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