Joint Indo-Chinese Team To Map, Study Glacial Melt At Sources Of Brahmaputra, Sutlej Rivers - ENN

NEW DELHI — A joint Indian-Chinese team plans to chart remote Himalayan glaciers that scientists fear are rapidly melting because of global warming, threatening the great rivers that give life to one of South Asia's most fertile regions.

The two expeditions, announced Thursday, will take scientists into some of the most remote areas of Tibet to explore the sources of two rivers that provide water for vast agriculture regions that feed nearly a sixth of the world's population. "The melting of the ice sheets and the glaciers is a crisis in the Himalayas," said H.P.S. Ahluwalia, who runs the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, which is organizing the expedition with China's Institute of Geology and Geophysics.

Scientists believe that increasing global temperatures are causing glaciers -- the planet's largest source of fresh water after polar ice -- to melt. The short-term result has been flooding, but some fear that over the long term the glaciers will melt entirely and the rivers will run dry for months at a time, fed only by annual rains like the monsoon that sweeps across the subcontinent every summer.

"In three to four decades these rivers that feed more than a billion people in our society and adjoining countries will become seasonal rivers," Ahluwalia said.

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