The temperature of the Land continues to increase and drop by drop the glaciers are melting. According to a report from the Unesco “All World Heritage glacier sites had a negative mass balance from 2000 to 2020, meaning they lost more ice than they gained,” which translates directly to miles of liters of water entering lakes, rivers, and seas. , emergence, to millions of people.
Specifically, the projections of said report calculate 48.5 billion tons of melted ice that would raise the sea level by about 15 centimeters or could overflow the glacial lakes.
The research indicates that the most exposed population is located in the countries of India, Pakistan, Peru and Porcelain.
United Nations article published in nature communications, this February 7th, he exclusively develops the GLOF problem (glacial lake burst floods, for its acronym in English). The BALLOONso “repentant emptying of a glacial lake” could, according to said article, “cause a significant loss of human life”.
For the study, three sets of data were compared: the number and condition of lakes fed by meltwater, the number of people living within 50 kilometers of a glacier lake basin, and how prepared communities are to deal with these floods. They found that some 90 million people in 30 countries live in 1,089 glacial lake basins, representing about 15 million people living within a kilometer of the flash flood zone.
“There are 1,089 glacier basins that can be ordered from highest to lowest risk. The first three are in Pakistan (basin of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Peru (basin of Santa) and bolivian (Basin of the Beni). Respectively, 1.2 million, 0.9 million and 0.1 million people could be exposed to the impacts of the GLOF“, the researchers point out.
What is the risk of GLOFs?
Glacial lakes are particularly unstable, being dammed up in most cases by ice or sediment made up of loose rock and debris. When the accumulated water breaks through these accidental barriers, massive floods can occur without prior warning and cause “significant material damage, infrastructure and agricultural land, causing numerous losses of human life”, according to the article of nature communications.
In addition, according to the researchers, “the lack of study and prevention measures for these events” is another risk factor. “Understanding which areas face the greatest danger from glacial flooding will allow for more targeted and effective risk management actions that in turn will help minimize loss of life and damage,” the authors report.
How is said risk determined?
“It’s not the areas with the most numbers or the fastest growing rates that are the most dangerous,” said lead author Caroline Taylor, a doctoral student at Newcastle University in England. “It is, instead, those areas with the highest population density or closest to a glacial lake and, most importantly, their ability to cope with a flood that determines the potential danger,” she explained.
For example, “in the last 70 years, thousands of people have lost their lives in the Cordillera Blanca (Peru) a cause of BALLOON; most by a reduced number of phenomena. While only 393 deaths have been recorded in the European Alps, in the last 1,000 years,” he added.
Other examples are the cases in the mountains of Asia or from the northwest of Peacefulis North America. The Americas have twice as many lakes as Asia, but fewer deaths from glacial lake flash floods.
PakistanAnother case of risk, it is home to more than 7,000 glaciers in the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush and Karakoram. Last summer, immediately after a heat wave, and during the sustained rains that followed, sudden torrents of melting glaciers in the north of the country destroyed thousands of kilometers of roads, railways, destroyed bridges and washed away entire towns.
In the world there are more than 200,000 glaciers that, today, are in danger. Some studies even indicate that a quarter of them will be melted by the end of the century, even if the Earth’s temperature is kept below 1.5°C. GLOF They are just one of its consequences.
BF/DE
You may also like
