13 NOVEMBER 2009 VOL 326 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.

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NEWS OF THE WEEK
NEW DELHIAre Himalayan
glaciers beating a rapid retreat in
the face of global warming? That
would seem to be the case,
according to a flurry of recent
reports by BBC and other mass
media. But the picture is more
complexand poses scientific
puzzles, according to a review of
satellite and ground measure-
ments released by Indias Min-
istry of Environment and Forests
earlier this week.
The report, by senior glaciolo-
gist Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly
of the Geological Survey of
India, seeks to correct a widely
held misimpression based on
measurements of a handful of
glaciers: that Indias 10,000 or so
Himalayan glaciers are shrinking
rapidly in response to climate
change. Thats not so, Raina says.
Even if it were, other researchers
argue that severe loss of ice mass
would not entail drastic water
shortages in the Indian heartland,
as some fear. Both concerns were
cited in the Asia chapter of the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Changes (IPCCs) 2007
Working Group II report, which
asserted that Himalayan glaciers
are receding faster than in any
other part of the world and, if the
present rate continues, the likeli-
hood of them disappearing by the year 2035
and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth
keeps warming at the current rate.
Some glaciologists hew to IPCCs view,
disputing Rainas conclusions. Any sug-
gestion that the retreat of Himalayan gla-
ciers has slowed is unscientific, charges
Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a senior fellow at the
Energy and Resources Institute in New
Delhi. He says the Indian government has
an ostrichlike attitude in the face of
impending apocalypse.
However, Indias environment minister,
Jairam Ramesh, told Science, We dont
need to write the epitaph for the glaciers, but
we need a concentrated scientific and policy
focus on the Himalayan ecosystem since the
truth is incredibly complex. India, he says,
needs to measure and monitor Himalayan
glaciers as a matter of national security.
With ice and snowfields covering more
than 30,000 square kilometers, the Hima-
layas are often called the third pole.
Records that began in the 19th century show
that most glaciers advanced through that cen-
tury as the Little Ice Age that gripped the
Northern Hemisphere tapered off. Glaciers
began to retreat in the early 20th century.
Since 1960, almost a f ifth of the Indian
Himalayas ice coverage has disappeared,
says Anil V. Kulkarni of the Space Applica-
tions Centre in Ahmedabad, who has mapped
more than 1000 glaciers using satellite data.
Rainas report, Himalayan Glaciers: A
State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies,
Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, con-
curs with that assessment. But it questions
a link to global warming. Findings in the
past few years, it states, demonstrate that
many Himalayan glaciers are stable or
have advanced and that the rate of retreat
for many others has slowed. The report
does not enumerate glaciers in
either category.
The Raina report draws on
published studies and unpub-
lished findings from half a dozen
Indian groups who have analyzed
remote-sensing satellite data or
conducted arduous surveys at
remote sites often higher than
5000 meters. The report revises
perceptions of a number of gla-
ciers, including two iconic ones.
For example, the 30-kilometer-
long Gangotri glacier, source of
the Ganges River, retreated an
average of 22 meters a year and
shed a total of 5% of its length
from 1934 to 2003. But in 2004
and 2005, the retreat slowed to
about 12 meters a year, and since
September 2007 Gangotri has
been practically at a standstill,
according to Rainas report,
which cites, among other obser-
vations, field measurements by
ecologist Kireet Kumar of the
G. B. Pant Institute of Himalayan
Environment and Development
in Almora. Even more stable is
Siachin glacier in Kashmir,
where Indian and Pakistani forces
are stationed eyeball to eyeball at
6000 meters. Claims reported in
the popular press that Siachin has
shrunk as much as 50% are sim-
ply wrong, says Raina, whose
report notes that the glacier has not shown
any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.
Several Western experts who have con-
ducted studies in the region agree with
Rainas nuanced analysiseven if it clashes
with IPCCs take on the Himalayas. The
extremely provocative findings are con-
sistent with what I have learned independ-
ently, says Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist
at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Many
glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains, which
straddle India and Pakistan, have stabilized
or undergone an aggressive advance, he
says, citing new evidence gathered by a team
led by Michael Bishop, a mountain geomor-
phologist at the University of Nebraska,
Omaha. Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at
Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo,
Canada, who just returned from an expedi-
tion to mountain K2, says he observed five
glacier advances and a single retreat in the
No Sign Yet of Himalayan Meltdown, Indian Report Finds
CLI MATE CHANGE
September 2004
September 2008
Hanging tough. Gangotri glacier, source of the Ganges River, retreated a few
dozen meters from 2004 to 2008hardly an abnormal retreat that would have
been expected from rising temperatures, states a provocative new report.
Published by AAAS

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Karakoram. Such evidence challenges the
view that the upper Indus glaciers are dis-
appearing quickly and will be gone in
30 years, Hewitt says. There is no evidence
to support this view and, indeed, rates of
retreat have been less in the past 30 years
than the previous 60 years, he says.
Why are many Himalayan glaciers buck-
ing the trend of rapid retreat seen in the Alps,
for example, or at Mount Kilimanjaro as
reported in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences last week? Glaciers at
lower elevations are going to respond faster
to a warming climate than those at the high-
est elevations, says Richard Armstrong, a
glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice
Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Snowfall
patterns are more important to Himalayan
glacier stability than temperatures, adds
Rajinder Kumar Ganjoo, a glaciologist at the
University of Jammu in India. If rising tem-
peratures were the real cause for the retreat,
then all ice masses across the Himalayas
should be wasting away uniformly, he says.
At issue in scientific circles, Kargel notes,
is how lengthy the response time is, and
how it varies among glaciers.
The bottom line is that IPCCs Himalaya
assessment got it horribly wrong, asserts
John Jack Shroder, a Himalayan glacier
specialist at the University of Nebraska,
Omaha. They were too quick to jump to
conclusions on too little data. IPCC also
erred in its forecast of the impact of glacier
melting on water supply, claims Donald
Alford, a Montana-based hydrologist who
recently completed a water study for the
World Bank. Our data indicate the Ganges
results primarily from monsoon rainfall,
and until the monsoon fails completely,
there will be a Ganges river, very similar to
the present river. Glacier melt contributes
3% to 4% of the Gangess annual flow, says
Kireet Kumar.
Atmospheric scientist Murari Lal, chair
of the Climate, Energy and Sustainable
Development Analysis Centre in New
Delhi and coordinating lead author of the
2007 IPCC reports Asia chapter, rejects the
notion that IPCC was off the mark on
Himalayan glaciers. But he acknowledges
that the reports 10-author team relied on
unpublished work when assessing the sta-
tus of the glaciers. Indias U.N. delegation
had objected to the wording, Lal recalls,
but in the IPCC plenary session the analy-
sis got wide support.
Rainas report is by no means the last
word. The surprising stability of some gla-
ciers may be a temporary phenomenon, says
Hewitt: Melting may have been reduced by a
change in summer weather, such as increased
cloudiness, and possibly unusually heavy
snowfall, he says. There needs to be a lot of
research on [Asias] mountain glaciers, adds
glaciologist Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio
State University, Columbus. Truly, we
know less about them than any other place on
Earth. Both sides of the debate agree on one
point: Forecasts hold little water, so only a
robust observation campaign will reveal
whether the third poles resistance to climate
change is durableor ephemeral.
PALLAVA BAGLA
www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 326 13 NOVEMBER 2009 925
NEWS OF THE WEEK
Could Glacier Research Help Thaw Himalayan Standoff?
NEW DELHIOn climate change policy, India and China are on the same page: They oppose
mandatory carbon emissions reductions. But they dont see eye to eye on the Himalayas. Both
countries claim a swath of the mountains as their own, a dispute that sparked a brief war in 1962.
Because of lingering tensions, a diplomatic initiative to get Chinese and Indian scientists working
together on glaciers has quietly been put on ice.
Last August, officials from the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, India, and
the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute in Lanzhou, China,
were preparing to ink an agreement in Beijing that would have paved the way for the sharing of
glacier data and hosting of research exchanges. But the signing ceremony was nixed at the last
minute. An Indian diplomat says the territorial dispute would have led to limited ground access
for the joint teams of researchers in the disputed regions. A Chinese government official places
the blame squarely on India: Indian scientists can receive permits for research expeditions with
Chinese colleagues [in the Tibetan Himalayas], but India refuses to allow Chinese scientists to join
fieldwork in its territory, he says.
The impasse frustrates scientists. Unless we combine data sets from both sides of the Himalayas,
a holistic understanding of the third pole will just not emerge, says former Wadia Institute Direc-
tor Baldev Raj Arora. He says both sides are now crafting a legal framework that would allow aca-
demic exchanges. Neither side will speculate on when an accord might be reached. P.B.
With reporting by Richard Stone in Beijing.
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Experts Criticize Nanoparticle Study
The headlines are laced with fear. All of them
seem to suggest that a new study has found
that nanoscale materials, used in everything
from medical imaging to cancer treatments,
can damage genetic material in our bodies.
But this particular study has little relevance
to human exposure risks, experts say, and it is
deeply flawed in other ways.
http://bit.ly/nanoparticles
More Support for Human Role in
Chinese Quake
When the Wenchuan earthquake killed some
80,000 people in southwest China in May of
last year, suspicion immediately fell on the
reservoir behind the nearby Zipingpu Dam.
Seismologists knew that several hundred mil-
lion tons of water had filled the reservoir in
the preceding few years and that either the
water itself or its weight might have weak-
ened a nearby fault and unleashed the
quake. A new analysis finds that both scenar-
ios are plausible, but further insight will
require the cooperation of the Chinese gov-
ernment. http://bit.ly/Wenchuan
No Sprinting Advantage
With Prosthetic Limbs
In 2007, South African
double-amputee sprinter
Oscar Pistorius became the
first disabled athlete to
compete against able-
bodied runners, placing
seventh in the British Grand
Prix. But his J-shaped, carbon-fiber prosthe-
ses, called the ssur Flex-Foot Cheetah,
sparked a debate within the athletic world:
Do the devices give him an unfairadvantage
over able-bodied competitors? The answer,
according to a new study of six amputee
sprinters, is no. http://bit.ly/prosthetics
Dont Shush That Baby; Its Learning
A newborns cry is a call to action. Quick,
somebody help me! But bawling babies are
getting something else besides attention:
language practice. A new study finds that, in
the first few days of life, babies produce cries
that mimic the melodies of their native lan-
guage. http://bit.ly/babycries
Read the full postings, comments, and more
on sciencenow.sciencemag.org.
From Sciences
Online Daily News Site
ScienceNOW.org
Published by AAAS

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