One of greatest things about working on Project Pressure is meeting others who are studying, documenting and trying to understand the world’s glaciers and the ways they’re changing. We recently came across just such a group – a team of glaciologists from Aberystwyth University who are looking at debris-covered glaciers respond to climate change. We’ve lent them a Garmin GPS-enabled camera to help create geo-tagged images in the Khumbu region of Nepal, which can then be compared with previous photographs taken in 2003.
As they explain in more detail on their project webpage:
“Mountain glaciers rapidly advance or recede with variations in climate and modify the hydrological budgets of glaciated catchments. In mountainous regions such as the Himalaya, the impacts of glacier mass loss on water resources are likely to be severe and the risks to human life posed by glacial hazards will increase with climate change. However, making predictions of the impacts of future climate change on the mountain cryosphere is challenging, particularly for large debris-covered glaciers. We combine 3-D glaciological modelling, remote-sensing observations and the collection of field data to quantify how debris-covered glaciers respond to climate change.”
The team are currently ‘somewhere near Everest’ en route to their study area, but you can follow them every step of the way via their Twitter account and on ours.
Photo by Uwe Gille