goodmorningpapua.com – Global warming has made the glaciers on earth melt. Indonesia has Asia’s last glacier that is also threatened, Mount Cartenz.
Quoted from the BBC, a third of the glaciers which are UN world heritage sites will melt within the next three decades. The ice at the top of Mount Cartenz, Papua’s Lorentz National Park is also in danger of disappearing.
Based on a UN report, glaciers in Papua are estimated to be going to have disappeared by 2050.
Some 18,600 glaciers have been identified at 50 UN World Heritage sites. These giant icebergs represent nearly 10% of the earth’s glaciers, and include well-known tourist attractions and shrines to locals. The disappearance of glaciers from the earth is the most dramatic evidence that the earth’s climate is getting warmer.
“We hope this possibility is false, but it is scientific evidence,” said a UNESCO project official, Tales Carvalho Resende, one of the report’s authors.
Glaciers are a valuable indicator of climate change, because they have a shape, so that their shrinkage can be seen.
Two-thirds of the remaining glaciers at the UN World Heritage site could be saved, provided the world could limit warming to 1.5C, the report added.
Another UN report last week found that the world currently ‘does not have a credible path’ to achieve that.
The projection builds on previous reports that use models to calculate how glaciers at World Heritage sites will change over time.
“The unprecedented in history is how quickly this will happen,” said Beata Csatho, a glacier expert at the University of Buffalo, who was not involved in compiling the report.
“In the mid-1900s, the glacier was quite stable. Then, it was shrinking very quickly,” he said.