Sentences with phrase «tropical glaciers»
The phrase "tropical glaciers" refers to glaciers that are found in tropical regions near the Earth's equator. It may seem unusual because we often associate glaciers with cold, icy places, but some mountains in tropical areas have glaciers due to high elevations and colder temperatures. Full definition
Maybe someone knows a study that has specifically addressed that for tropical glaciers?
realclimate.org
Peru has the largest expanse of tropical glaciers in the world, but between 1987 and 1997 they shrank by about 15 percent, a trend that is picking up speed throughout the Andes.
Most other tropical glaciers studied are also undergoing unprecedented retreat, and big changes are also underway in Antarctica.
Yet the «sceptics» jump on these findings similar as they did with tropical glacier retreat (hence my article here).
La Paz's main water supplies come from rainwater and melt - off from tropical glaciers in the Cordillera Real range, which includes Chacaltaya and the Tuni - Condoriri glacial system set in the mountains above the region's largest reservoir.
In contrast to the midlatitude case, tropical glaciers do not have summertime melt seasons characterized by above - freezing air temperature.
As tropical glaciers are located half way between the two regions, they could have been expected to respond indiscriminately to both cooling periods.
Add to your check list of reality the fact that Himalayan glaciers are melting at an alarming rate (see RC threads on tropical glacier melt); enough so that flash flooding, from overflowing glacier - melt lakes, is a serious and life - threatening concern of downstream populations.
A prime example, Haeberli said, is the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya, which is one of the best - studied tropical glaciers.
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a climate dynamicist at the University of Chicago, kindly offered to write a guest editorial to further clarify what we do and don't know about tropical glacier retreat.
The two studies will help scientists to understand the natural variability of past climate and to predict tropical glaciers» response to future global warming.
«Cold snap in the tropics: How tropical glaciers respond to cooling periods.»
The study analyzes how much temperatures have increased in the region near Indonesia, and how ocean temperatures affect nearby tropical glaciers in Papua New Guinea and Borneo.
If we had a completely reliable instrumental record of tropical mid-tropospheric warming, we wouldn't be talking so much about using tropical glaciers as indicators of climate change, would we?
«The authors wrote that the dry weather both limited the snows that help sustain tropical glaciers and, by reducing cloud cover, allowed more solar energy to bathe the glacier.
[Kaser and Osmaston 2002] calculate that such tropical glaciers are even more temperature - sensitive than midlatitude glaciers.
Soot levels in alpine glaciers for instance are much larger than in Greenland (because of the proximity to the sources) and the same is likely to be true for tropical glaciers near areas of biomass burning.
Because of the spatial homogeneity of tropical free - tropospheric temperature, when one sees tropical glaciers recede in concert, there is strong reason to presume that air temperature is playing a direct role, temperature being the one thing that is expected to change in lock - step throughout the tropics.
That suggests that the high Tropical glaciers are pretty clean.
If tropical glaciers continue to retreat despite an increase in precipitation, that will constitute a powerful case for the role of air temperature.
The reason there are tropical glaciers at all is that temperature decreases with altitude, as a consequence of the compressibility of air.
Some argue that the combined increase in temperature and humidity is the major reason for accelerated tropical glacier retreat in the Andes toward the latter half of the twentieth century.2
Now, some scientists express doubt that any Andean tropical glaciers will exist in 30 years.
The filmmakers go on a «journey along the spine of the Andes mountain range, from Colombia to Argentina to know the individuals and lives of those who are first affected by the dwindling tropical glacier reserve, the canaries in the mine.
To accurately estimate the height of tropical glaciers and average temperatures at altitude in this region, they found that atmospheric mixing, through a process known as entrainment, needs to be factored in.
Indeed, warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa's Kilimanjaro massif, just 3 degrees south of the equator, and to a lesser extent other tropical glaciers.»
His specialty is extracting cylinders of layered, ancient ice from tropical glaciers, and when his team drilled into one of the mountain's ice fields in 2000, water flooded out of the hole.
For instance, one important driver of global temperatures, El Niño, leaves its chemical mark in the snow that falls on tropical glaciers.
The argument is just nonsense, and doesn't deserve much rebuttal — just notice that tropical glaciers didn't disappear during any Holocene «warm period», for example.
Tropical glaciers in Peru serve to control water supplies by producing runoff during drier periods, and accumulating ice during wetter periods.7 This important function is likely to be reduced and ultimately lost as glaciers retreat.
«Tropical glaciers are a bellwether of human influence on the Earth system,» says Will Steffen, director of the International Geosphere - Biosphere Program in Stockholm, Sweden.
The results — along with a recent Dartmouth - led study that found air temperature also likely influenced the fluctuating size of South America's Quelccaya Ice Cap over the past millennium — support many scientists» suspicions that today's tropical glaciers are rapidly shrinking primarily because of a warming climate rather than declining snowfall or other factors.
TROPICAL glaciers may sound like a contradiction in terms, but they do exist.
The research shows that tropical glaciers have their own dynamics (different from that of the more extensively studied Alpine glaciers), which incorporates climatic influences from both hemispheres (rather than mainly from the northern hemisphere, which is the case for Alpine glaciers).
Analyses carried out by an international group of researchers in the Andes (where more than 99 % of tropical glaciers are found) show that these glaciers expanded not only during cooling over Greenland (12,000 years ago) but even more so during a cold event in Antarctica (14,000 years ago).
The scientists were thus able to demonstrate that, on a thousand - year scale, tropical glaciers both north and south of the equator evolved in a similar manner.
A key point is that tropical glaciers are of crucial importance to Andean populations, who depend on them for drinking water and electricity.
As elsewhere on the planet, tropical glaciers (located on either side of the equator between 23 ° N and 23 ° S) have been retreating since the Last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago.
Tropical glaciers have responded to episodes of cooling in Greenland and the Antarctic over the past 20,000 years, according to a study carried out mainly by researchers at the CNRS, Université Joseph Fourier, Aix - Marseille Université and the IRD, in collaboration with other French scientists and colleagues in the US, Colombia and the UK.