http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20020606/sc_nm/environment_everest_dc_1
Global Warming Blamed for
Melting Everest Glacier
Thu Jun 6, 2002, 9:17 AM ET
GENEVA (Reuters) -
A glacier from which Sir Edmund Hillary
and Tenzing Norgay set out to conquer Mount Everest
(news - web sites) nearly 50 years ago has retreated three
miles up the mountain due to global warming (news - web sites),
a U.N. body says.
A team of climbers, backed by the United Nations (news - web sites)
Environment Program (UNEP), reported after their two-week visit
last month that the impact of rising temperatures was everywhere
to be seen.
The landscape bears
the scars of sudden glacial retreat, while
glacial lakes are swollen by melted ice, UNEP spokesman Michael
Williams told Reuters on Thursday.
During their visit,
the team of climbers from the International
Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) spoke to the head
of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, Tashi Jangbu Sherpa,
who told them that the ice fields had seen rapid change over
the past 20 years.
"He told us that
Hillary and Tenzing would now have to walk
two hours to find the edge of the glacier which was close to
their original base camp," Williams quoted UIAA president
Ian McNaught-Davis as saying.
In 1953, New Zealander
Hillary and Tenzing, a native of
Nepal, became the first climbers to reach the summit of
the world's highest mountain.
UNEP recently warned
that more than 40 Himalayan glacial
lakes were dangerously close to bursting, threatening the
lives of thousands of people, because of ice melt caused
by global warming.
According to scientists,
the average global temperature
could rise by 1.4-5.8 degrees Celsius over the next 100
years unless governments take action to cut emissions of
so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.
