High-Altitude Himalayan Permafrost Line Seems To Be Moving Higher, Japanese Scientists Discover

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Jan. 22, 2007 — Some of the perennially frozen ground high in the Himalayas has been shrinking, say Japanese scientists.

The year-round frozen "permafrost" ground was found to start at 17,000 to 17,400 feet above sea level (ASL) on the south-facing slopes of Nepal's Khumbu Himal in 1973, but is now at 17,700 to 18,000 feet (ASL), report Kotaro Fukui and his colleagues in the February issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change. Oddly enough, another measurement of the permafrost there in 1991 showed the same lower limit as 2004.

"Thus, it is possible that the permafrost lower limit has risen 300 to 1,000 feet (100 to 300 meters) between 1973 and 1991, followed by a stable limit of 17,700 to 18,000 feet (5400 to 5500 meters) over the last decade," the researchers report.

The likely cause of the thaw is global warming, which appears to be affecting the south-facing Khumbu Himal more quickly than on the nearby Tibetan Plateau, explains Fukui, a researcher at Japan's National Institute of Polar Research. Unfortunately, because the researchers have only three permafrost snapshots to judge by — 1973, 1991 and 2004 — there's just not enough data available to say much more about what's going on. "That's the problem with any climate study: too little data," said climatologist Oliver Frauenfeld of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Many places that are likely to see the greatest changes from global warming are in remote mountains or polar regions which are hard to monitor closely.


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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/01/22/himalaya_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20070122094500&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000