IS IT curtains for Himalayan glaciers? A controversial prediction that found its way into the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said they'd be gone by 2035, but a detailed new analysis contradicts it. In fact, it says, most of them aren't shrinking at all.
The primary aim of the study was to determine how rising carbon dioxide levels will affect Asia's "water towers" - the glaciers whose meltwater supplies drinking and irrigation water for 1.4 billion people. To do this, Walter Immerzeel of Utrecht University in the Netherlands used data from a pair of satellites known as GRACE to estimate changes between 2001 and 2007 in the thickness of the glaciers that supply the Indus, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers.
He found that only the 100-metre-thick glaciers feeding the Ganges ...
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