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The Himalayas are home to some of the highest glaciers on the planet, but that does not make them immune to the worsening climate crisis.
The ice that has accumulated there for thousands of years is melting at an alarming rate, according to University of Maine scientists.
They have calculated that the South Col Glacier on Mount Everest, which lies nearly 8,000 feet[8,000 m]above sea level, has lost within three decades the ice that has accumulated in more than 2,000 years.
At these rates, it is no wonder that in the coming decades, participants on Mount Everest expeditions climb over the most exposed rocks, as their layer of snow and ice continues to thin.
The loss of volume from the glacier is thought to have accelerated as its surface turned from snowdrift to ice, losing the ability to reflect back solar radiation, which now results in a faster melting.
By the time the glacier’s surface is regularly exposed, in a quarter of a century it has thinned by approximately 55 meters, meaning 80 times faster than the nearly 2000 years it took to form ice on the surface.
The research, which involves taking samples from the area’s ice at a depth of 10 meters, shows that its loss rate is reaching almost 2 meters per year.
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