Climate Change Leading to Water Shortage in Andes, Himalayas

Rapidly melting glaciers causing similar problems on two continents.

By Laura Arenschield; Ohio State News

Representative Image Source: Pixabay, labeled for reuse

Climate change could have devastating effects on vulnerable residents in the Andes mountains and the Tibetan plateau, according to researchers at The Ohio State University who have been studying glaciers in those areas for decades.

Their findings—that glaciers in both parts of the world are melting more rapidly than at any point in the last 10,000 years—mean the water supply in parts of Peru, Pakistan, China, India and Nepal will decline, soon.

“Supply is down. But demand is up because of growing populations,” said Lonnie Thompson, a climate scientist at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. “By 2100, the best case scenario is that half of the ice will disappear. Worst-case scenario: two-thirds of it will. And you’ve got all those people depending on the glacier for water.”

Thompson, a distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, presented the team’s findings on Dec. 14 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.

Thompson has been studying and documenting the effects of climate change on glaciers in Peru for more than 40 years. The glaciers there supply critically needed water for people, crops and livestock. In 2016, Thompson and researchers in China and India launched a research initiative to conduct similar research on the Tibetan plateau, which holds thousands of glaciers that supply water to people in parts of Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Tajikistan. The international research team dubbed the plateau the “Third Pole” because it contains the largest stores of freshwater in the world outside of the North and South poles.

Since then, they have drilled ice core samples from across the Tibetan plateau and the Andes mountains, examining the ice for clues about temperature, air quality and other large-scale events in history.

“The last 200 years or so, we really understand,” Thompson said. “Now we are looking at the last 10,000 years.”

What they are finding is causing him some alarm.

There have been times throughout history when the glacial ice cores showed temperatures increased—during an El Nino, for example. But within the last century, the cores from both the Andes and the Himalayas show widespread and consistent warming.

“This current warming is not typical,” Thompson said. “It is happening faster, it is more persistent and it is affecting glaciers in both Peru and India. And that is a problem, because a lot of people rely on those glaciers for their water.”

Melting glaciers can trigger such hazards as avalanches and floods. And they also can have long-lasting effects on a region’s water supply.

As the glaciers melt, initially those regions will have more water. But over time, as the glaciers shrink, the water those glaciers typically supply will dwindle, Thompson said.

“Precipitation is down and temperatures are up and that leads to retreating glaciers,” he said. “There are 202 million people in Pakistan who rely on water from the Indus River—and that river is fed by the glacier.

The effects in Peru, too, could be far-reaching, particularly on Peruvian agriculture and on the water supply in Lima, the Peruvian capital.

Thompson and his team are hoping that by studying the glaciers in both areas, they will find answers to slow glacial retreat—or to provide new water sources to at-risk areas.

“The problems are similar in both the Andes and the Tibetan plateau,” he said. “The hope is that by finding solutions, we can help both places.”

Source: Ohio State News

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1. NATURE IS PROTECTED FROM HUMAN

   The basis of all floods and droughts is water, its excess and deficiency. Water is the main mediator, means and condition for the existence of life on the planet. Water accumulates in the clouds, moves, precipitates, dissolves minerals and organic matter in itself, delivers it to animals and plants - biota. Water itself is not a product, it is a supplier. The further way of the water is the numerous transformations in the food chains and return to the atmosphere. Each type of plant and a living organism, and within each species, each individual has his own personal ability to extract the substances dissolved in it and remove the waste moisture from his body. One of the main properties of water is that it does not disappear, but participates in the creation of all tissues of the body and the vital activity of organisms and changes itself. All waste in the form of exhalation, discharge, sweat, transpiration of plants have their own specific individual properties. The further path of evaporation also has certain natural uses. This is how we feel the fragrance of flowers when inhaled; animals smell their victims and partners by smell. Expiratory and urine medics diagnose diseases. After this, evaporation rises into the troposphere, unites and forms into a single substance of cloud cover and water circulation on Earth. The volume of water in the balance of this circuit corresponds to the volume of all life on the planet. A symbiosis of biota and water over millions of years has built a graph of the distribution of water — the amount, time, and place of precipitation; various arid zones have been formed in terms of the volume and duration of precipitation — deserts and tropics, forests and steppes.

   The allocation of moisture and waste of the animal and plant worlds is the most important link in the circuit. Processing time and the movement of water in food chains and the release of waste has a certain speed and duration, and this determines the speed of the circuit.

   The development of our civilization has destroyed a significant part of the biota - almost 70 percent of the land we used for arable land, mines, landfills, asphalt, artificial reservoirs, cut down forests. Man uses water not only and not so much for drinking, but as an improvised material for the production of material goods, comfort, many different needs.

   Solvent-based water and a supplier of nutritional products have become the working medium, a tool in a variety of technological processes, where only its physical properties are used. Often destroying its chemical composition - removal of salts before boiling and heating in heat exchangers. These are washing, cooling, boiling, transportation, energy production and many other uses in production, agriculture and municipal processes, after which the water evaporates directly and after discharge into the sewers and rivers. As a result of industrialization, humanity is increasing its water consumption for these purposes at an increasing rate. Almost all waters taken from nature by man have lost their natural functions, their natural meaning. The historical process of processing evaporation in the atmosphere, the formation and distribution of cloud systems, broke down. Precipitation began to fall out not in well-established areas, not in periods set by nature. Often, if they fall out, then in such increased volumes that overflow rivers and flood large areas with floods. This is confirmed by recent studies:

   “At present, according to a new analysis of data collected at meteorological stations around the world, half of the precipitation a year falls in just 12 days.

   By the end of the century, climate models predict that this one-sided distribution of rain and snow is likely to become even more asymmetric, and half of the annual precipitation will fall in 11 days.

   These results were published in a geophysical research letter from the Journal of the American Geophysical Union. ": Https://thewaternetwork.com/_/climate-change-and-the-environment/article-FfV/half-of-the-worlds- annual- precipitation-falls-in-just-12-days-new-study-finds-wOcamCYuSZaC81N9KQ7rug

   Currently, in 2018, the water cycle on the surface of the Earth consists of 520,000 km3 of water. At the same time, 109,000 km3 a year falls on the continents, and 72,000 km3 or 72 trillion tons evaporates, the rest flows into the seas and oceans [1].

   The officially accepted hypothesis of climate change found the culprit - carbon dioxide. According to UN experts, “the increase in CO2 emissions ranged from 0.5 to 5% per year. As a result, over the past hundred years, only 400 billion tons of carbon dioxide has been released into the atmosphere due to the combustion of fuel ”[2]. On average, over a hundred years - 4 billion tons per year. We divide by 2.2 trillion rubles by 4 billion, we get 18,000. It is eighteen thousand times that evaporation exceeds carbon dioxide in terms of volumes lifted into the atmosphere in 1 year. In other words: the atmosphere accepts 1 part of CO2 and 18000 parts of water vapor. Only from this alone, it can be concluded that the effects on climate and weather produce more evaporation of water, and not CO2. It each of us feels in the cloudyth day.

   According to [3], annually mankind extracts up to 20 thousand cubic kilometers of groundwater for its needs. Plus, according to [4], people irrevocably take about 2 thousand cubic kilometers of fresh water from rivers and lakes. Annually. All this water through pipes and channels goes into another redistribution. Redistribution of unnatural consumption. Washing sewage into the sewage system, water solutions of a wide variety of chemical and biological substances - from household chemicals to residues of petroleum products during washing, to pesticides from the fields. Sewage is drained to septic tanks and rivers. Water molecules react with molecules of a multitude of chemicals and organics, and, for sure, they take something into the atmosphere when they evaporate. Such an assumption can be made if we take into account the appearance of acid rain. Maybe they do not capture, but their own quality, structure is not the same as that of vapor molecules exhaled by biota. Evaporation from drying washed things - dishes, linen, asphalt, from coolers and evaporators of many factories, from the surfaces of sumps, nature is not provided. All such evaporations can be safely called artificial evaporations. Research on the quality of evaporation from biota and artificial evaporation was not found. This is just an assumption, a hypothesis and, as each hypothesis, needs proof. Studying the issue is quite simple, but very important - it determines the differences between organic and artificial fumes, can provide a fundamental basis for conclusions about the role of water in climate change. And a real means of preserving and restoring climate.

   Without focusing on the quality of evaporation, it is necessary to pay attention to the quantitative and temporal parameters of evaporation. To these should be added and the total evaporation from degraded areas - landfills, arable land, reservoirs. The precipitation they do not find their natural consumers and evaporate without structural changes - what came, then went. Significant amounts of destruction of water molecules occur directly in the air by a variety of internal combustion engines, all furnaces and heaters. Each volume of atmospheric air contains water in a molecular state. When it gets into the burner of the furnace or the cylinders of engines, compressors, this moisture does not burn, does not disappear. It changes its structure and after the exhaust joins the artificial vapors.

   It is assumed that the entire volume of artificial evaporation only from water and irrigation water alone has become commensurate with the total land evaporation and, moreover, has approached a critical level in terms of the cycle time and cycle. The mechanism of natural transformations broke down in the troposphere. Nature had no such amount of evaporation before, before the development of civilization. There was a transition from quantity to quality. New volumes for nature have led to a new mechanism of action in the troposphere — natural disasters and climate change have begun. The growth of artificial vapors continues with the development of industry and our comfort. Moreover, this growth has a rather strong acceleration, as industrial and utility technologies develop and expand, increasing productivity in agriculture, mining, construction of cities and roads, and hydroelectric power plants with water accumulation in reservoirs.

   Artificial evaporation has a speed greater than natural. In the soil, water spreads and is consumed by plant roots, microbes, worms, and exhaled over time, in accordance with the properties of plants or living organisms. Each accepted portion of water passes, all stages of organic transformations of the body and goes with the distribution in time after a few days with breathing steam, secretions and transpiration of the plant. The water, which stood in a puddle on the asphalt or heated in a kettle, leaves instantly in a few minutes. Consequently, artificial evaporation returns to the atmosphere much faster, and dense clouds hang over us almost continuously. We have rarely felt sunny days.

    This is one of the factors by which the weather anomaly is observed. The second factor comes from the analysis of natural disasters. There are areas of the planet where there is unprecedented rainfall, leading to flooding. Conversely, areas that are not subject to precipitation for a long time - there are droughts and fires. Anomalous sediments began to appear where they had never been - in the deserts. The third factor is the rise in ocean levels with a simultaneous decrease in glaciers. The loss of stability in the distribution of precipitation by geographic location gives the right to think that the burdened clouds do not reach the polar and mountain glaciers and precipitate along the way. The natural growth of glaciers is decreasing, and precipitation in other places replenishes rivers and oceans.

   Thus, the quality, volume and speed of artificial evaporation broke the mechanism of water circulation valid for millions of years and lead to a global catastrophe.

   If we want to leave our descendants a normal climate, then we should start to return its nature to nature

    

    

   [1]  http://ru-ecology.info/page/00307874802712200330005000049688/ 

   [2] http://www.refsru.com/referat-17732-3.html 

   [3]  http://jkg-portal.com.ua/ru/publication/one/globalna-posuha-abo-problemi-vodospozhivannja-32688       

      [4] http://www.kursach.com/geografiya-ekonomicheskaya-geografiya/816-referat-gidrosfera-v-sostave-biosferi/view-details.html 

   [5] http://ecology.md/page/rashod-vody-na-proizvodstvo-produkto 

   [6] https://studopedia.ru/12_86797_proizvodstvo-hlopka-pri-umenshennom-rashode-vodi.html