Glaciers across the Tibetan plateau are melting ‘at an accelerated rate,’ raising concerns for harvests and river-flows in China and India, according to environmental experts. ‘The majority of the glaciers across this region are in retreat,’ China expert Isabel Hilton said, speaking recently at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. ‘The continued research on these glaciers suggests that they will be gone by 2050,’ Hilton added. Tibet’s glaciers are the source of Asia’s major rivers’including the Yellow River, the Mekong, and the Ganges’said Hilton, founder and director of the London-based environmental group chinadialogue. ‘And millions of people depend on [these rivers] for agriculture, for drinking water, for living.’ ‘We’ve taken the glaciers and the world’s water supply for granted,’ Hilton said, adding that ‘some 15,000’ glaciers are involved. The entire Tibetan plateau is a ‘climate-change hot spot,’ Hilton said. Glaciers at middle levels of elevation are retreating faster than those at higher elevations, Hilton said. ‘It’s just bad luck that they form a substantial proportion of what’s there.’ Nomads affected Rising temperatures are already having an impact in Tibet, Katherine Morton, a China specialist at Australia National University, said, also speaking […]