New Guinea’s Glaciers an El Nino Archive
Melting. Melting Glacier’s. What can we do? They’re all melting! Oh won’t someone please think of the… glaciers?
It seems to be one of the predominant headlines these days with journalists the world over informing us that glaciers are indeed melting, and that it has to do with the warming temperatures. Well, you know what? I think we’ve got it by now.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m staggered by the sheer amount of glaciers melting (not to mention their locations; who ever thought of glacier’s existing in South America?), but it’s like the news of the Northwest Passage opening; we get it already!
So that I am about to bring to your attention another melting glacier, in an even more unlikely location, should suggest to you just how important this one could be.
It isn’t another canary in the coalmine, or proof of human-made greenhouse gas emissions burning the planet to cinders (although, who needs any more, right?). This time, the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya in New Guinea will be visited by Lonnie Thompson, who views them as a vanishing archive of the history of El Nino.
"No one knows how thick these remaining glaciers are," Thompson said of Puncak Jaya, or Mount Jaya. "We do know they are disappearing."
But New Guinea is not necessarily all that easy to figure out according to some scientists. "There are indications of warming," explained local Kasis Inape, a senior government climatologist. "But we can’t really confidently say the temperature change has been this much or that much, because the actual data are lacking."
And while Inape will be leading a companion project to Thompson’s, with an aim to assess recent climate changes on New Guinea along the 1,200 mile mountains, Thompson is looking to the past, for the future.
"We may actually see an El Niño history there," he said in a recent interview, and he believes that that history will help foretell the future, and he isn’t the only one.
Thompson hopes that investigating the past temperature changes and how they affected El Nino could help scientists predict how much worse and more frequent El Niño’s droughts, storms and floods may grow as the world warms in the future.
The quest for ice-cores from the New Guinea glaciers will take place May-June 2009, and will take Thompson and his crew will in to isolated, mist-hidden highlands, rarely visited by even the locals, let alone intrepid scientists.
The last scientific expedition was led by an Australian, Ian Allison, in 1973 when he and colleagues trekked seven days through the wilderness that is New Guinea. "In the fourth or fifth day you see in the distance the sheer limestone cliffs with the ice on top, and it’s really quite a sight," Allison recalled by phone from Australia.
But they aren’t going in without knowledge, considering that Texas A&M University geographers have been using satellite imagery to investigate the area. "We’re tracking their demise by satellite images," the university’s Andrew Klein said from College Station, Texas. "If current retreat rates continue, they will disappear in a few decades. This is similar to what’s happening to tropical glaciers around the world."
Puncak Jaya’s Meren Glacier, one of five ice-masses surveyed in the 1972-73 expedition led by Allison, has vanished completely, disappearing sometime between 1994 and 2000, according to the Texas researchers. In the following two years, the remaining glaciers lost more than 7% of their total area. The researchers estimate that, since 1850, Puncak Jaya’s ice has shrunk from an area that covered some 7 square miles, to an area less than just one square mile.
But Thompson hopes that, despite their deterioration, the glaciers will provide a record from which to work from. "There is no other such record in the wider region, which really stretches from the eastern Pacific to the Himalayas," he said. "It’s the only record of its kind in what is nearly half of the tropical zone."
"It’s important to get an archive for the future because 20 years from now our technology will be so much more advanced, and our ability to read these records will be much improved," he added.
