Earth is turning out to be less hospitable to human life. With a growing rate of environmental degradation, we are putting our own lives at complete risk and there is no question whether humans will be the main victim of their own mass extinction.
Deforestation is one of the activities that humans have long been doing but they hardly find time to plant a sapling.
On the contrary, Himalayas has now lost ice at a brisk pace in the last 20 years. Over the last 4 decades, the melting of glaciers has, in fact, doubled in the region.
The recent study shows that since 2000, glaciers heights have been shrinking fast by an average of 0.5m per year. Scientists cite climate change is the main cause of this.
However, in the latest development, by the year 2050, 36 million Indians could lose their homes to flooding caused by increasing sea levels, as per new estimations from US-based research group Climate Central.
While earlier models have estimated that about 5 million Indians were at massive risk, the new research — which is said to evaluate coastal elevation more precisely suggests a seven-fold rise from the earlier estimate. The impact is heavily focused in Mumbai, Kolkata, Odisha, coastal Gujarat, as well as Chennai and Kochi.
Researchers learnt that Himalayan glaciers are melting at double the rate since 2000.
Between 2000 and 2016, the glaciers melted nearly twice as fast, losing about 8 billion tonnes of ice each year on average.
Global climatic change is now seen as a larger issue in today’s world. With climate change, obviously there comes a rise in temperature and thereby polar ice caps would melt in no time only to raise water levels in the sea. It’s really hard to imagine how the Earth was and is now.
Though there is technology to better the lives of human beings, there isn’t one to restore the planet back to normal. Humans should immediately take all possible measures to save the environment instead of wasting time in useless researches.
Glaciers in the Arctic region are speeding up to melt way too faster than the scientists had thought. The researchers from the University of Zurich behind the study combined data from field observations of glaciers in the Arctic region including the others in Alaska, the Alps, and elsewhere. They discovered that glaciers around the planet have literally lost more than 9 trillion tons of ice between 1961 and 2016. Due to that, water levels have also risen a frightening 27 millimetres.
The amount of glacier ice lost each annual year has increased to a larger extent in the last 30 years. As of 2018 i.e 335 billion tons of ice melted in one year, means that sea levels will rise at least 1mm per year.
Scientists had earlier estimated that sea levels would rise 30cm by the year 2100. This new outcome could possibly mean the changes we see in the next couple of decades will be worse than estimated. With the constant increase in sea levels, there would obviously be flooding of low-lying areas and fierce hurricanes, tsunamis, and storms.
(With inputs from TNN)