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During her lecture Revisiting the Tibetan Plateau: Global Climate Change and its Effect on the Headstreams in China, at the Capital Library in Beijing, Wang Yongchen, founder of nonprofi t environmental organization Green Earth Volunteers, kept on repeating one question in a solemn voice, “What can we do?”

Wang’s organization has been constantly observing and studying water resources in China. Her recent trip to the Tibetan plateau was Wang’s third visit to the area in 10 years.

Known as the “roof of the world” and “water tower for Asia,” the Tibetan plateau has the world’s highest mountains and glaciers, including Mount Qomolangma and almost all of the headstreams of China’s major rivers including the Yangtze River, Yellow River and Yarlung Zangbo River. It also contains the world’s third-largest store of ice. Due to its ice storage capacity, the Tibetan plateau is considered to be as important as the North and South Poles in regulating the world’s climate and indicating global climate change.

According to academic Cheng Guodong, an environmental expert on cold and arid regions at Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a change of 1-2 degrees on the Tibetan plateau would result in a global climate change of 3-4 degrees.

Climate change on the Tibetan plateau has become the focus of discussion at global climate conferences and seminars in recent years. The 2007 World Environmental Day was themed “Melting Ice ?a Hot Topic?” to address the problem of disappearing glaciers on the Tibetan plateau and North and South Poles.

As the World Climate Conference in Copenhagen approaches, the focus on glaciers on the Tibetan plateau has once again raised heated discussion in China. However, during Wang’s one month in the area, she discovered that the increase in focus has not stopped glaciers from melting and disappearing.

“There used to be a huge forest of seracs in the Jianggudiru Glacier, the origin of the Tuotuo River, Yangtze River’s upstream, when we visited the place 10 years ago. I was marveled by the giant seracs and had taken many pictures of them,” Wang said. “But when I reached the same place this July, I saw no more seracs there.”

Snow lines in the area have also risen at a rapid pace, according to Wang. She said that the snow line was at the foot of the Rongbuk Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery with the highest altitude on earth in Dingri county, Xigaz?, when she visited in 2001. However, eight years later, the snow line was far above the monastery.

The shrinking

Zhaling Lake on the Tibetan plateau. “We don’t have any professional facilities to measure how high up the snow line has moved. But I eyeballed the distance to be at least three kilometers,” she said.

Wang also mentioned that Mount Xixiabangma, the 14th highest mountain in the world, looked completely white in 2001; but the glaciers covering it had since melted, revealing dark rocks beneath.

A report by the Tibetan Plateau Climate Change Monitoring Service System Program in 2008 found that the giant glaciers, behind the Tibetanplateau’s name of “the third pole on the planet,” were disappearing at an accelerated annual rate of 131.4 square kilometers a year and the snow lines at the border of the plateau were retreating 350 meters annually.

According to Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, CAS, glaciers in Asia have decreased 7 percent in the past 40 years, for which climate warming in the Tibetan plateau took the biggest responsibility.

Danzengdunzhu, deputy director at the Tibetan Meteorological Administration said that no snowstorm had hit Tibet since 1998 and the warmest four winters in the past 35 years were all after the year 2000. He also observed that warming was more obvious in high-altitude areas compared to lowaltitude areas. Areas with an average altitude of over 4000 meters exhibited the biggest temperature rise.

Qin Dahe, the former head of China Meteorological Administration, commented that temperatures on the Tibetan plateau were rising four times faster than elsewhere in China and that Tibetan glaciers were retreating at a higher speed than in any other part of the world. Qin said that in the short term, the melting glaciers would cause lakes to expand and bring fl oods and mudfl ows, which would be good for agriculture and tourism in Central Asia. He added that glaciers are vital lifelines for Asian rivers, including the Indus and the Ganges; if they vanish, water supplies in those regions will be in peril.

Wang said that apart from rising temperatures, unregulated mining and tourist growth in Tibet have also contributed to the ecological changes.

During her trip to Tibet in June, Wang found that local monks were not wearing shoes. When asked why, they told her that June is spring in Tibet and they were afraid to hurt the grass that sprouts during that time of year.

“It’s Tibetans’ awe for nature and their sanctifi cation of every living creature that warded the Tibetan plateau for thousands of years,” Wang said. “Maybe this can give us some inspiration on how to deal with global climate change in the future.”

By Liu Chang