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Melting glaciers threaten ice core science on the Tibetan Plateau

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 656–657 (2023)Cite this article

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Ice cores from mountain glaciers and ice fields hold a wealth of information on Earth’s climate extending back centuries and even millennia1,2. Reconstructions of past environmental conditions are key to understanding the resilience and fate of glaciated areas on the Tibetan Plateau, which is relied upon for water by billions of people. Ongoing climate warming is, however, progressively causing the melting and disappearance of glaciers across the Tibetan Plateau region, destroying the valuable climatic archives (which are, for example, sampled by ice cores) they contain3.

Following persistent high-elevation warming starting in the 1980s, changing precipitation patterns and increasing deposition of light absorbing impurities (for example, black carbon) have led to most glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau — especially in the southeast plateau and the Himalayas — going into retreat, with approximately 340 Gt of glacier ice mass lost between 2000 and 20183. More than one third of Tibetan Plateau glacier ice mass is projected to be lost by 21003,8, even in Pamir, Karakorum and West Kunlun where glaciers currently appear to be stable.

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Fig. 1: Distributions of ice cores and glaciers’ equilibrium line altitudes over the Tibetan Plateau.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledged the second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0605), Outstanding Youth Fund of Gansu (23JRRA612), and the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science (SKLCS-ZZ-2022).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China

    Yulan Zhang & Shichang Kang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shichang Kang

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  1. Yulan Zhang
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  2. Shichang Kang
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Correspondence to Shichang Kang.

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Zhang, Y., Kang, S. Melting glaciers threaten ice core science on the Tibetan Plateau. Nat. Geosci. 16, 656–657 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01239-7

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