In central Asia, a warming climate is shrinking the Tuyuksu glacier. It's losing ice every year.
Around the world, vanishing glaciers will mean less water for people and crops in the future.
By Henry Fountain and Ben C. Solomon
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The world’s roughly 150,000 glaciers, not including the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last four decades they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick.
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The Little Almaty and several other [rivers fed by the Tuyuksu, a glacier in Kazakhstan,] flow through and around the city. They supply some of the drinking water for the region’s two million people and irrigation water for fields of corn and other crops outside the city.
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Eventually these rivers will be affected by glacial retreat, said Arthur Lutz, a hydrologist with FutureWater, a Dutch water-resources consulting firm. The timing may vary; the Indus, for example, is more dependent on glacial melt than the Ganges, which receives much of its water from the monsoon.
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In the mountains of Kazakhstan, the decline may start sooner.
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When flows in [rivers fed by the Tuyuksu] begin to decline, the region’s farmers could face a crisis.
Most of the irrigation works in the region date from the Soviet era. They are old, run-down and inefficient.
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