CHINA: The icefields at the roof of the world, the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, are melting faster than anyone thought, new research shows, which means more deserts, droughts and sandstorms to add to China's litany of pollution woes, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing
Global warming is melting the famously beautiful plateau, which spans Tibet and the surrounding countryside, at 7 per cent annually, Prof Dong Guangrong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the Xinhua news agency.
Prof Dong said the melting icefields would ultimately trigger more droughts in already parched China, expand desertification and increase the frequency of sandstorms.
The findings come from a study of more than 40 years of data compiled from China's 681 weather stations.
It has been known for some time that the glaciers are melting. Last year, scientists said three-quarters of the glacier in the southeast of Tibet and the marine glacier along the Hengduan mountains, a series of parallel mountain ranges running through the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet, would fade away by the year 2100 if the temperature rises by 2.1 degrees.
The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers 2.5 million sq km - about a quarter of China's land surface - at an average altitude of 4,000m above sea level. The world's highest icefields are a natural biological museum for the array of geological phenomena they contain.
This year the Chinese government is planning to run a railway line across the plateau for the first time. China has ruled the remote, mountainous region of Tibet since 1950.
Meteorologist Han Yongxiang said average temperatures in Tibet have risen by nearly one degree centigrade since the 1980s, accelerating the melting of the glacier and frozen tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.
The desert is creeping right up to the edge of Beijing, despite the planting of millions of trees to stop the sand's onset.
Drought is a fact of life and sandstorms are getting worse every year in north China. A strong sandstorm swept across huge swathes of the country last month. One particularly virulent storm dumped 330,000 tons of dust on Beijing and spread its tentacles as far as Korea and Japan.
The glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau account for 47 per cent of the total glacier coverage in China.
The advance of the desert costs the provincial government of the Tibetan region up to €1 billion a year.
The weather bulletin in China may soon include a "dust forecast", Xinhua quoted a China meteorological administration official as saying.