Mount Everest Photos: Then (1921) and Now - Melting Glacier

[pampango]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/mount-everest-then-and-now/73024/

Having just written about the efforts of Chinese and Tibetan observers to grasp the impact of melting glaciers (and drying streams) in the Himalayas, I wanted to add a note about another way to visualize changes underway as the planet warms.

During one of his famed attempts to ascend Mt. Everest in 1921, the British adventurer George Mallory and his entourage took photographs of what they saw. In 2007, American mountaineer David Breashears stood in the same place Mallory had been, and his team took a second high-resolution photograph. Breashears, who now works with GlacierWorks and the Asia Society, wanted to record the changes in the ice sheets.

Below is a graphic that combines that 1921 photograph and its 2007 counterpart. Both show the north face of Mt. Everest, as seen from Tibet. The river of ice snaking downhill is known as the main Rongbuk glacier. Here Breashears estimates the glacier has lost 320 vertical feet in ice mass.

[alphafemale]

1. wow. Just FBed that link.

Thanks.

That Stephen Colbert seems apt here.

"It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is."

[jimlup]

2. I'm an avid climber and I've seen similar on lesser mountains

Particularly in the Peruvian Andes, though I have only seen them in their current state the fairly young guides said that they have observed significant glacial melting in their lifetimes.

[Urban Prairie]

3. I see so many posts and topics created by rightwingers on other messageboards

commenting on the unusually cold and snowy winter, and poking fun @ global warming. Even if they knew or believed that climate change is true, their worship of money, the wealthy, and corporate capitalists would take precedence over the damage that we are doing to the planet.

What really makes me despise the RW is their belief that "drill baby drill" would make the US less dependent or even independent of imported oil, when it is the multinational Big Oil conglomerates who would own the extracted crude oil, and not the US government, since if it did, that would be....gasp...socialism!!

Fucking hypocrites, the lot of them.