"Because of climate change, the roughly 1.7-mile-long Baishui Glacier No. 1 could well be one of the first major glacial systems on the Tibetan Plateau to disappear after thousands of years. The glacier [...]has receded 830 feet over the last two decades and appears to be wasting away at an ever more rapid rate each year. [...]
[...] the Tibetan Plateau and its environs shelter the largest perennial ice mass on the planet after the Arctic and Antarctica [...] Its snowfields and glaciers feed almost every major river system of Asia during hot, dry seasons when the monsoons cease, and their melt waters supply rivers from the Indus in the west to the Yellow in the east, with the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Rivers in between. [...]
[...] the respected Chinese glaciologist Yao Tandong recently warned that, given present trends, almost two-thirds of the plateau’s glaciers could well disappear within the next 40 years. [...]Moreover, temperatures on the Tibetan plateau are rising much faster than the global average. [...] The slow-motion demise of Baishui Glacier No. 1 will have far-reaching consequences. [...]These will have national security consequences as countries compete for ever scarcer water resources supplied by transnational rivers with as many as two billion users.[...]"
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