Himalayan glaciers are 'not just melting, they are dying'

Perhaps it is not a place that many climate sceptics visit. Though standing on Gokyo Peak, the view before you is spectacular and according to glaciologists - quite worrying. For the giant 22km long Ngozumpa Galcier that dominates the Gokyo valley in the Everest Himalaya is dead, glaciologists claim.

For Jason Gulley, a Karst Hydrogeologist at the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida, their demise is certain. 'The debris-covered areas of the glaciers [in the Mount Everest region] are dead and no longer flowing,' he says. In effect this means the glacier has stopped grinding its way innorexably through the Gokyo valley as it should and is now in a state of terminal decline. This is largely due to high CO2 emissions in our atmosphere which have resulted in rising temperatures across the world and partially due to brown haze air pollution.

The same is true of many of the great glaciers of the Great Himalayan Range - which stretches from northeastern India some 2,500 km across to the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While it is true that there is no evidence to suggest all these glaciers will have melted by 2035 - as the scientists who wrote in their UN...

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