New Zealand's largest glaciers are retreating fast in the face of global warming and could disappear altogether, scientists said yesterday.
A report by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said the volume of ice in New Zealand's Southern Alps had shrunk almost 11 percent in the past 30 years.
More than 90 percent of this loss was because the 12 largest glaciers in the mountain range were melting due to rising temperatures, NIWA said.
The glaciers have passed a threshold, causing the ice to collapse and creating large lakes at their base, the report said.
"The 12 big glaciers with these pro-glacial lakes have passed a tipping point," NIWA's principal scientist Jim Salinger said.
"It is not yet clear whether the glaciers will disappear completely with future warming, but they are set to shrink further as they adjust to today's climate," he said. "And it is already clear that they will not return to their earlier lengths without extraordinary cooling of the climate, because the large lakes now block their advance."
Tasman Glacier, the longest in New Zealand, is now about 23km long. A 5km lake has formed at its base in the past 30 years. In the 1880s, the glacier was 28km long.
But increased rainfall on the western side of the Alps has meant the results for smaller glaciers on that side are mixed, NIWA said.
These ice sheets advanced during most of the 1980s and 1990s amid periods of higher rainfall.
But the Franz Josef glacier, is still much shorter than in 1900 and has retreated about 230m since 2000, Salinger said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing