Tracking the Himalaya's Melting Glaciers. By David Breashears, YaleEnviro360, July 15, 2010. "For those who know the Himalaya well -- I have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest five times in the past three decades -- the warming of this great mountain chain is something that we have come to experience personally. The Sherpas who live atop 'the roof of the world' and the climberswho often return are acutely aware of how much temperatures have risen at high altitudes in recent years, and how extensively the snow and ice on the massive Himalayan glaciers has thinned and retreated. But it wasn't until 2007, when I went back to Everest as part of a documentary for the PBS series, Frontline, that I fully grasped the magnitude of the melting in this region, often called 'The Third Pole' because of the massive volumes of ice in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau.
"Trekking in Tibet, not far from the northern slope of Mount Everest, I carried with me a black-and-white photograph taken by the great English mountaineer, George L. Mallory, in 1921. It showed the ice-encrusted north face of Everest and, below it, the great river of ice known as the Main Rongbuk Glacier, flowing in a sweeping, S-shaped curve down a broad, stony valley. It was at that moment I decided to proceed with the project whose results are visible in the accompanying photographs. The Glacier Research Imaging Project, which I helped found, has retraced the steps of some of the world's greatest mountain photographers as they took pictures -- many of them not previously published or displayed -- over the past 110 years across the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. I then returned to those same vantage points and took photographs that bear witness to the rapid warming of the Himalaya and the swift retreat of its glaciers. The result is an exhibition -- 'Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya' - a collaboration with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations and now on display at the Asia Society Museum in New York through Aug. 15. These then-and-now pictures have a powerful effect on the viewer, one that I hope will bring home the reality -- and serious consequences -- of global warming."
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