PARIS - As the planet's polar ice sheets destabilize amid rising temperatures, a landmark UN assessment of Earth's retreating frozen spaces is also set to spell out how melting mountain glaciers will impact humanity in the decades to come.
AFP has obtained an official draft summary of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) report on oceans and the cryosphere.
It says that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost roughly 400 billion tons of mass annually in the decade to 2015, corresponding to a sea-level rise of around 1.2 millimeters each year.
But glaciers high up mountains also lost around 280 billion tons of ice each year during the same period, raising seas a further 0.77 millimeters annually.
"In the past 100 years, 35 percent of global sea-level rises came from glacier melting," Anders Levermann, climate professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact, told AFP.
He said that future sea-level rises from glacial melt alone would be limited to 30 to 50 centimeters as they contain a limited amount of ice.
By comparison, there's enough frozen water in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to lift global sea levels several dozen meters.
"(Melting glaciers) contribute significantly to sea-level rise, it's just not this huge number that Greenland and Antarctica could contribute," added Levermann, who was not involved in the IPCC report.
There are roughly 200,000 glaciers -- vast, ancient reserves of ice -- on Earth and their relative smallness compared to the polar ice sheets makes them especially vulnerable to rising temperatures.
Their retreat is likely to impact inland communities the world over, for whom glaciers are a key water source.
The glaciers nestled high in the Himalayas provide water for 250 million people in nearby valleys and feed the rivers upon which a further 1.65 billion people rely for food, energy and income.
One study referenced in the IPCC report warns that Asian high mountain glaciers could lose more than a third of their ice, even if humans slash greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
A continuation of "business-as-usual" in the coming decades with a global economy still powered mainly by fossil fuels could see two-thirds lost.
"Drinking water is going to be affected, agriculture is going to be affected and we are talking about millions and millions of people," said Harjeet Singh, international climate lead at ActionAid.
The IPCC summary said that areas of the central and western Himalayas are already facing a noticeable fall in water for irrigation.
'A glacier is a reservoir'
The summary also warned that in regions with little ice cover, including Central Europe, North Asia and Scandinavia, glaciers were projected to shrink 80 percent by 2100.
One study this year by scientists in Switzerland warned that unchecked emissions could see more than 90 percent of Alpine glaciers disappear by century's end.
Harry Zekollari, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said most people did not appreciate how crucial the giant ice structures were.
"A glacier is a reservoir. A healthy glacier will typically melt in summer and become a bit bigger in winter. That means that when people need water most, they get water from the glacier," Zekollari told AFP.
'Fighting for water'
Melting glaciers also have other human impacts.
The citizens of La Paz, Bolivia's administrative capital, get as much as 30 percent of their water from Andean glaciers during the dry winter months.
In 2016, the city ran dry.
"About 100 neighborhoods were without any water for more than a month, it was like a horror movie from the future," Marcos Andrade, director of the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics at San Andres University, told AFP.
"People were fighting for their water."
Despite this stark example of what can happen when glacial water supply is disrupted, Andrade said there was a paradox in explaining how melting glaciers are bad news for agriculture.
"We have now more water from the glaciers because they are melting and farmers maybe don't realize that," he said.
"Things are going better for them at the moment. But once the water reaches a peak it will be scarce and it's going to be something we are probably going to fight over."
The IPCC says glacier runoff is likely to continue to increase in the short term before declining late century, bringing increased instability and more landslides, avalanches and more polluted water.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MOSCOW - Russia's nuclear agency said Saturday an explosion during missile testing in the Arctic left five workers dead and involved radioactive isotopes after a nearby city recorded a spike in radiation levels.
Rosatom said the force of the explosion on Thursday blew several of its staff from a testing platform into the sea.
Russia's military did not initially say that the accident involved nuclear equipment, but stressed that radiation levels were normal afterwards.
Officials in the nearby city of Severodvinsk nonetheless reported that radiation levels briefly increased after the accident.
The incident occurred in the far northern Arkhangelsk region during testing of a liquid propellant jet engine when an explosion sparked a fire, killing two, a defense ministry statement said.
It was not known whether those two deaths were among the five that Rosatom reported.
Russian state news agencies quoted a defense ministry source as saying both defense ministry and Rosatom employees had been killed.
Rosatom said its staff were providing engineering and technical support for the "isotope power source" of a missile.
The missile was being tested on a platform at sea when its fuel caught fire and triggered an explosion, Rosatom said in a statement quoted on Russian television.
Several staff were blown into the sea by the blast, the nuclear agency said, adding that it only announced the deaths once there was no more hope that the employees had survived.
The accident left three other people with burns and other injuries, Rosatom said.
Authorities initially released few details of the accident at the Nyonoksa test site on the White Sea, used for testing missiles deployed in nuclear submarines and ships since the Soviet era.
The defense ministry said six defense ministry employees and a developer were injured, while two "specialists" died of their wounds.
Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies said his "working hypothesis" was that the blast "was related to Russia's nuclear-powered cruise missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik (NATO name: SSC-X-9 Skyfall)."
Radiation spike
Authorities in Severodvinsk, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the test site, said Thursday on their website that automatic radiation detection sensors in the city "recorded a brief rise in radiation levels" around noon that day.
The post was later taken down and the defence ministry said radiation levels were normal after the accident.
A Severodvinsk civil defence official, Valentin Magomedov, told TASS state news agency that radiation levels rose to 2.0 microsieverts per hour for half an hour from 11:50 am (0850 GMT).
This exceeded the permitted limit of 0.6 microsieverts, he added.
Greenpeace Russia published a letter from officials at a Moscow nuclear research center who gave the same figure, but said higher radiation levels lasted for an hour. The officials said this did not present a significant risk to public health.
Ankit Panda of the Federation of American Scientists noted on Twitter that the missile "is suspected to have some sort of a miniaturized reactor in its propulsion unit," and added: "a crash likely resulted in not-insignificant radioisotope dispersion."
Russian online media published an unattributed video which reportedly showed ambulances speeding through Moscow to a centre that specializes in the treatment of radiation victims.
Rosatom said the injured were being treated at a "specialized medical center".
Iodine panic
An expert from Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research, Boris Zhuikov, told RBK independent news site that isotope power sources are not normally dangerous for people working with them.
"If they are damaged, people who are nearby could be hurt. Isotope sources use various types of fuel: plutonium, promethium or cerium," Zhuikov said.
The radioactivity levels involved are "absolutely not comparable with those during serious accidents at reactors," he added.
But news of the accident prompted Severodvinsk residents to rush to pharmacies for iodine, which can help prevent the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation.
"People started to panic. Within a matter of an hour all the iodine and iodine-containing drugs were sold out," pharmacist Yelena Varinskaya told AFP.
In 1986, the Soviet Union suffered the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl, a disaster that authorities initially tried hard to cover up.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
OSLO, Norway—Covering some 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) over the polar ice sheets in only 76 days, an arctic fox has reached Canada after setting off from Norway in an unprecedented feat of endurance.
The journey is not only a testament to the fox's stamina but also highlights the important role ice sheets serve for the migration of Arctic wildlife and the threat global warming poses to the ecological balance.
Arnaud Tarroux, one of the researchers behind the study recording the fox's trek published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, warned that "less ice... will mean less opportunities for this type of migration."
The arctic fox was equipped with a satellite tracker in July 2017 and set off from the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, on March 26 2018.
On June 10, 76 days after leaving Norway, the fox reached Ellesmere Island, one of Canada's northernmost communities, completing a journey of 3,506 kilometers.
"This species is even more enduring and faster than what has been observed in the past," Arnaud Tarroux told AFP Wednesday.
"It's a young female, less than a year old, therefore relatively inexperienced, literally going out to discover the world and surviving an Arctic crossing on her first attempt," he continued.
Adding to the impressive feat is that the young vixen covered the first 1,512 kilometers to reach Greenland in just 21 days.
"This is the first observation that shows in detail that an arctic fox has migrated between different continents and ecosystems in the Arctic, and one of the longest migrations ever recorded for an arctic fox in such a short period of time," the Norwegian Polar Institute noted in a statement.
The fox withstood the arid polar environments and moved at an average daily rate of 46.3 kilometers, with a daily record of 155 recorded while crossing Greenland.
Why the fox opted to leave for Canada is unclear.
"It is quite possible that it is simply a series of coincidences that led her to find herself in an area of the Canadian arctic at the right time to find enough resources to be able to settle there," Tarroux said.
The fox's current whereabouts are unknown since the tracking system stopped working in Feb. 2019.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
