glaciers

Subject: Global warming blamed for melting Everest glacier

SWITZERLAND: June 7, 2002

GENEVA - A glacier from which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
set out to conquer Mount Everest nearly 50 years ago has retreated
five km (three miles) up the mountain due to global warming, a U.N.
body says.

A team of climbers, backed by the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP), reported after their two-week visit last month that the impact
of rising temperatures was everywhere to be seen.

The landscape bears the scars of sudden glacial retreat, while glacial
lakes are swollen by melted ice, UNEP spokesman Michael Williams told
Reuters yesterday.

During their visit, the team of climbers from the International
Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) spoke to the head of the
Nepal Mountaineering Association, Tashi Jangbu Sherpa, who told them
that the ice fields had seen rapid change over the past 20 years.

"He told us that Hillary and Tenzing would now have to walk two hours
to find the edge of the glacier which was close to their original base
camp," Williams quoted UIAA president Ian McNaught-Davis as saying.

In 1953, New Zealander Hillary and Tenzing, a native of Nepal, became
the first climbers to reach the summit of the world's highest
mountain.

UNEP recently warned that more than 40 Himalayan glacial lakes were
dangerously close to bursting, threatening the lives of thousands of
people, because of ice melt caused by global warming.

According to scientists, the average global temperature could rise by
1.4-5.8 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years unless governments
take action to cut emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, such as
carbon dioxide.

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE