The Earth’s “Third Pole”: Tibetan Plateau Faces Rapid Warming

After Antarctica and the Arctic, the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas hold more ice than anyplace on earth. And, as the journal Nature reports, the plateau is undergoing rapid warming that has caused 82 percent of its glaciers to retreat in the past 50 years and its permafrost to begin to melt. Ice core studies show that the plateau has warmed at a rate of .3 degrees C per decade in the last half-century — three times the global rate. One reason for the accelerated pace of warming is that the arid region’s dust storms, coupled with the large amount of “black carbon” soot from the plateau’s many cooking fires, cause more solar energy to be absorbed in the atmosphere and on snow and ice. The warming of the Tibetan plateau will not only impact the water supplies of hundreds of millions of people dependent on glacier-fed rivers, but may also alter weather patterns throughout Asia.