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Outside Magazine December 2003
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The Hard Way
Fire and Ice (cont.)

IF THE ALPS ARE transmogrifying so radically, what about the other mountain ranges of the world?

An August 2001 United Nations report cited "a rapid retreat of nearly all glaciers" in the Himalayas and the Karakoram from 1860 to 1980. A UN team dispatched to Nepal's Everest region found that compared with 50 years ago, when the peak was first climbed, the area is now "unrecognizable as ice has retreated up the mountain." The glacier that was once at the foot of nearby Island Peak is now a mile-long, 330-foot-deep lake that is imperiling villages downstream—just one of 20 new glacial lakes in Nepal that the UN identifies as being "in danger of bursting its banks."

In Africa, Ohio State geologist Lonnie Thompson has found that 33 percent of the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro has disappeared since 1980, 82 percent since 1912; last January, a chunk of the mountain's Furtwängler Glacier dislodged and rained down on the summit crater. Mount Kenya's famous Diamond Couloir ice route, put up in 1977 by Yvon Chouinard and Mike Covington, is now nothing but an ugly rock gully.

In the Snowy Mountains of Australia, the tree line has jumped 100 feet, after 300 to 500 years of stasis. John Morgan, a botanist at Melbourne's La Trobe University, believes Australia could lose its precious alpine ecosystem entirely within the next 70 years.

In the south-central Peruvian Andes, the Quelccaya ice cap has shrunk by 20 percent since 1963. Eight mountaineers were killed in July when a giant block of ice near the summit of 19,511-foot Alpamayo broke loose. Thirty-five climbers have died in the Andes in the last five years, almost twice as many as in the previous five-year period—a jump locals attribute to unstable conditions.

Of course, it's not just glaciers and tundra that are feeling the heat. Sea levels have risen four to ten inches in the last hundred years and could rise another two to three feet in the coming century, threatening coastal cities from New York to Shanghai. With rising global temperatures, the mosquito has extended its range, bringing malaria, dengue fever, and West Nile virus to previously unafflicted regions. Other species, such as North America's pika—a rabbitlike mammal deftly adapted to alpine terrain—are on the decline: In the 2003 Journal of Mammalogy, Erik Beever, of the U.S. Geological Survey, cited a 28 percent reduction in the animal's population across the West between 1898 and 1999, due largely to warmer temperatures.

As for the much-debated cause of global warming, the answers are slowly becoming clear. Even the U.S., one of only 15 nations that has not ratified the fundamental 1992 Kyoto Protocol, has conceded the predominance of scientific proof. "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise," states the EPA's 2002 U.S. Climate Report, which identifies automobile use, oil refining, and electrical power generation as primary offenders.


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