Irreversible damage

Erosion of glaciers must be slowed

The recent collapse of a massive glacier of New York’s size in East Antarctica and persistent loss of age-old ice deposits in the Arctic region have worrisome oceanic and terrestrial upshots that cut across the continents. The rise in sea level and changes in the temperature and acidity of the sea waters as a consequence of unabated global warming bode ill for the existence of several small island nations and coastal habitations, apart from marine fisheries and aquatic biodiversity. The Arctic Report Card 2021, the 16th in the series of peer-reviewed annual reports issued by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the state of the earth’s once reliably frozen zone, reveals this region is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe. The October-December 2020 quarter was the warmest period on record dating back to the year 1900. Consequently, the mass of older, multi-layered ice has shrunk to its second-lowest level since 1985. Shockingly, a 3,200-metre-high summit in Greenland, in the vicinity of the North Pole, got history’s first rainfall, instead of the usual snowfall, in August last. The entire polar region has, thus, turned substantially different from what it was a few decades ago due, predictably, to human-induced climate change.

The most unnerving ramification of the nonstop degradation of glaciers is acceleration in the pace of rise in sea level, which, the NOAA reckons, has more than doubled between 2006 and 2015. This strengthens the credibility of the omi- nous projections made by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the sea level would swell by 40-63 cm by 2100. Should this hold true, which now seems fairly certain, it would affect over 250 million people inhabiting low-altitude areas around sea shores across the globe. Many coastal towns and smaller islands may disappear from the map. Closer home, the countries facing the greatest risk of part of their territories being devoured by the bulging seas include the Maldives and Bangladesh. Studies indicate that about 77 per cent of the land area of the Maldives — home to around 540,000 people and 1,200 small coral islands — might be lost if the sea level surges by 45 cm. In Bangladesh, about 32 million people are feared to face the consequences of bloating sea level by 2100.

India, with a coastline of 7,517 km, cannot remain unscathed. One of the recent IPCC reports has indicated that over 28.6 million people living in the coastal towns like Chennai, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Surat, and Visakhapatnam would be exposed to coastal flooding if sea level goes up by 50 cm. This apart, India is staring at dreadful repercussions of the ongoing degradation of glaciers in the Himalayan region as well. Water streams emanating from the ice mounds in the Hindu Kush mountains meet the needs of some 86 million Indians. Besides, the glaciers in the Lahaul-Spiti region in the western Himalayas are also projected to decline by two-thirds if global warming continues at the present pace. Since the damage to the globe’s frozen resources is hard to retrieve, all that can be done now is to mitigate a further erosion of glaciers by cutting down harmful emissions and stepping up efforts to adapt to the impacts that cannot be staved off.