MALI: In an effort to assess the impacts of Nepal’s April 2015 earthquake to Mount Everest’s glaciers, researchers from the United Kingdom recently made a trip to the region. They found that many of the pools of meltwater accumulating on the glaciers have expanded to much larger lakes.
The scientists zeroed in on Khumbu Glacier, a shifting, winding river of ice that is covered by dust and debris like other glaciers nearby. Their inspection revealed that the lower part of the glacier has been shrinking due to the loss of ice underneath it.
Measurements for the past 15 years show that the surface of the debris-covered glacier has been declining at the rate of two meters per year.
The expanded water bodies stretch so far that, in many cases, it’s possible to traverse them with a small inflatable craft. And indeed many of the researchers from the University of Leeds and U. Sheffield took the opportunity to paddle across them.
But the implications of the expanded meltwater lakes go much farther than just providing new places to set sail. For those living nearby, news of their growth is quite serious, as the risks of glacial lake outburst floods can only go up as meltwater bodies expand.
