Mount Everest's largest glacier is melting at an alarming rate

It has been suggested by one of the study’s lead researchers, Dr Mariusz Potocki, that, “the South Col Glacier may be on the way out – it may already be a ‘relic’ from an older, colder, time”.

Dr Tom Matthews, a climate scientist from Kings College London, and a co-author of the study, told the BBC that no single change had occurred in the region’s climate to cause the surge in melting. “Instead, the steady uptick in temperatures eventually pushes the glacier across a threshold, and suddenly everything changes”, he explained.
Dr Paul Mayewski led the team of ten scientists, on what was a first, as studies on the effect climate change might have on glaciers at this altitude had never been carried out previously.
They installed what were the world’s two highest-ever weather monitoring stations on the glacier. Samples from an ice core approximately 10 metres long (32ft) were subsequently extracted.

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Mayewski said the study “adds a high elevation understanding that has not previously been available, and that drives home the remarkable sensitivity Earth systems have to even relatively small change”. He also suggested that this rapid melt could cause “significant regional to global scale implications”.

The South Col Glacier “is very small in the grand scheme of things”, Dr Matthews told the BBC, adding that they must now examine “to what extent the sensitivity we’ve discovered here applies more widely to ice stores on the roof of the world”, as reported by bbc.com.

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