The Himalayan glaciers that feed major south Asian rivers like the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges are melting more rapidly, reveals a major new study which says that soaring global temperatures are not the only reason. The study, led by Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Tibetan Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and eminent glaciologist and paleo-climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, is the most comprehensive examination so far of the region’s glaciers. “The status of the glaciers had been a bone of contention,” reported the weekly science journal, Nature, whose sister publication, the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Climate Change, published the study.

“Earlier this year, an analysis of 7 years’ worth of measurements, taken by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission, suggested that high-altitude Asian glaciers on the whole are losing ice only one-tenth as fast as previously estimated, and that glaciers on the Tibetan plateau are actually growing.” The GRACE mission is a joint partnership between the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Germany

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