With climate change being the main cause of glacier retreat, deterring visitors will have little impact.
By Lin Qiqing
In an effort to try and save its fast-disappearing glaciers, the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China has banned tourists from glaciers under its new five-year plan. The mountainous area is home to China’s largest glaciers, which have been receding rapidly in recent years.
Because glaciers across western China are sources for the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, among others, their recession threatens to impact the water supply of millions of people.
Xinjiang is the first region in China that has imposed such a ban, with officials saying that tourism revenues have been insufficient to offset the huge environmental costs. But Chinese scientists warn that global warming is the main cause of glacier retreat, and that the tourism ban will do little to reverse the trend.
Xinjiang covers one-sixth of China’s land area and contains 47 percent of the nation’s ice. The region’s glaciers have been melting at alarming rates, as temperatures there are rising at three times the global average, according to state news agency Xinhua.
In the past 30 years, glaciers in the Tian mountain range — the water tower of Central Asia — have shrunk by 15 to 30 percent.
The snowcapped Tian Mountains are bordered by desert, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Sept. 3, 2009. Courtesy of chinadialogue
The famous Glacier No. 1 is the major source of water for Urumqi, the provincial capital, located only 50 kilometers away. The glacier is more than 4.8 million years old, but it may not last much longer, having lost 15 meters in height from 1958 to 2010, with the rate accelerating after 1980. Then in 1993 the glacier split, forming two smaller ones.
The government first banned visitors to the glacier in October 2006 in order to prevent the contamination of Urumqi’s main source of water. In April 2014, authorities set up a nature reserve in the region, prohibiting mining and restricting the use of vehicles — but still the glacier loss continued.
Meanwhile, tourist numbers rose. “Lots of people came because they thought it would be their last chance to do so,” said Li Zhongqin, director of the local glacier monitoring station.
Glaciers are “solid reservoirs” in dry regions such as Xinjiang, a rugged landscape of mountains, forests, and deserts. In the long term, shrinking glaciers will have a major impact on river flow, and in particular on the region’s so-called green belt — a major source of agriculture.
The combination of melting around the base of the glacier and the weight of ice and snow on top has also led to avalanches and icefalls. Last year, the region lost 15,000 mu (2,500 acres) of pasture land due to avalanches coming from glaciers.
Glaciologists have observed this retreat across western China. The second national glacier inventory, published in 2014, found that glaciers in western China have shrunk by 18 percent since the 1950s, with an average loss of 244 square kilometers per year.
Conducted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the eight-year study showed that China currently has 48,571 glaciers covering 51,480 square kilometers and containing 5,600 square kilometers of ice. Apart from Xinjiang, most of these glaciers are located in the Tibetan Plateau. The Himalayas and surrounding mountains feed the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, as well as Asia’s other major rivers, including the Indus, Mekong, Salween, and Brahmaputra.
Global warming, said Kang Sichang, is responsible for the significant retreat of the Himalayan glaciers. Kang is an expert working on the MacArthur Foundation’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment Project and a glaciologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Kang said that glaciers are receding fastest in the Altai Mountains of northern Xinjiang, and in the Trans-Himalayas, where 37 and 32 percent of glaciers were lost, respectively.
An abandoned open-air mine at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Aug. 10, 2009. Courtesy of chinadialogue
The glacier area in the Qomolangma National Nature Reserve in Tibet has shrunk 28 percent since the 1970s. Glaciers on the southern slopes of the mountains, which sprawl into Nepal, have shrunk by a quarter since the 1980s.
In the short term, melting glaciers will increase water flow in rivers and lead to the formation of larger glacial lakes, said Kang. Remote sensing data shows that the area covered by these lakes within the Qomolangma reserve increased to 114 square kilometers in 2013, up from 100 square kilometers in 1990, increasing the risk of flooding.
In the long run, melting glaciers will reduce water availability downstream. “There will be a short-term increase in river flow, but in the long term there will be an overall reduction, as the glaciers retreat or disappear entirely,” said Kang.
Although glacier tourism has become more popular, experts believe Xinjiang’s ban won’t be enough to save them.
Glaciers are retreating even in parts of the world where there are no tourists, Kang said. “As long as it is well-managed, glacier tourism is not a problem,” he said, adding that he approves of “glacier viewing” from a distance but is more skeptical of allowing tourists to walk over glaciers.
Kang does not believe that “appropriate” activity in glacial regions, such as hiking and skiing, will make them shrink — instead, he said that excessive trips to glaciers, leftover trash and litter, and construction or mining projects will have a bigger impact. These activities turn a glacier gray, reducing its ability to reflect light and thus hastening melting.
Cattle pass by polluting smokestacks upstream of the Urumqi River, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Sept. 2, 2009. Courtesy of chinadialogue
Industrial ventures such as mining pose a major threat to glaciers, along with bottled water companies eyeing the natural ice. Gelaixue Glacier Water, for example, is directly tapping Glacier No. 1 even though the environmental stakes are high.
Yang Yong, director of the Hengduan Mountain Research Institute, has made a number of visits to Glacier No. 1. He told TheThirdPole.net, a news site focusing on the Himalayan watershed, that tourism isn’t the problem, and that “restrictions on tourism alone won’t stop the melting.”
But the policy decision has already been made. Li Yidong, party secretary at Xinjiang’s tourism bureau, said, “Glacier tourism has made less than 1 billion yuan ($147 million), but the costs of glacier collapses and melting are incalculable.”
Other regions in China may now follow suit. The local government in southwestern Yunnan province is considering a tourist ban on the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, whose glaciers are also melting rapidly, according to Huang Chengde, head of the Guiyang Public Environmental Education Centre.
The mountain is a well-known scenic area that gets quite crowded, despite a daily cap on visitor numbers. The snow line is creeping ominously further up the mountain.
Research by the Kunming branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that glacial melting now accounts for only 29 percent of the mountain’s groundwater — meaning the glaciers are shrinking.
The mountain sits on the southeast edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and in 1957 it had 19 glaciers covering 11.61 square kilometers. Today there are just 13, covering 4.42 square kilometers.
He Yuanqing, head of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain research station, found that since 1982, Glacier No. 1 has receded 265 meters up the mountain. At that speed, he said, it could disappear completely in the coming decades.
This is an original article by China Dialogue, and has been published with their permission. The original article can be found on their website https://www.chinadialogue.net/.
(Header image: Over the years, Glacier No. 1 has separated into two branches, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Sept. 2, 2009. Courtesy of chinadialogue)
