TEXTO:
Thickening glaciers
A team of scientists has shown that the glaciers in
one of Asia’s major mountain ranges are defying the
general tendency towards shrinkage, and have in fact
expanded slightly over the last few years. The range in
5 question is the Karakoram, which straddles Pakistan,
India and China on the north-western end of the
Himalayas.
Glacial decline and the gradual loss of polar ice
caps has been a worrying trend over recent decades,
10 but scientists have been aware of an apparently curious
anomaly with the Karakoram, which contains some of
the world’s biggest mountains including the second
highest, K2. It has about 20,000 square kilometers of
glaciers, accounting for three percent of the total area of
15 ice outside the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
Now a team of French scientists has carried out a
detailed survey over a large area of the range using
sophisticated remote-sensing measurements. Writing in
the scientific journal, Nature, they say they found that in
20 the first years of this century the Karakoram’s glaciers
had actually expanded by a small amount, while in the
neighboring Himalayas they’d been shrinking.
It’s unclear why this is happening, but it seems that by
a quirk in the weather pattern that’s not fully understood,
25 less heat is being delivered to the Karakoram and the
mountains are receiving heavier falls of snow.
Thickening glaciers. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 21 jul. 2012.
The French scientists involved in the survey mentioned in the text are using
