Reaching into the dangerous level, the ice melting in Himalaya reaches the number 8 billion tons per year

News24xx.com - Photographs from a number of US satellites reveal that melting ice in the Himalayas has reached the dangerous level. By comparing photographs captured by the Cold War era surveillance program and recent spacecraft monitoring, scientists found the ice melting process in the Himalayas doubled over the past 40 years.

Studies show that since 2000, the glacier height in the region reduced in average of 0.5 meters per year. "From this study, we really see a clear picture of how the Himalayan glaciers have changed" Joshua Maurer, from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Monitoring Institute affiliated with Columbia University, told the BBC. The study referred to Maurer can be seen in the journal Science Advances.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a US surveillance program codenamed Hexagon launched 20 satellites into orbit to take photographs of the Earth in secret. The photos are stored in film rolls which are then dropped by satellites into the atmosphere, then the film roll was taken by a military plane.

The series of photographs were no longer kept secret in 2011 and turned into a digital form by the US Geological Survey institute for the purpose of science. Among the photos, there are photographs of the Himalayas, a region where its historical data is rare. By comparing these photos with NASA satellite data and the Japanese space agency (JAXA), the researchers were able to see how far the Himalayan region has changed.

The Columbia University team has reviewed 650 glaciers in the Himalayas that stretch for 2,000 km. They found that between 1975 and 2000, an average of four billion tons of ice disappeared every year. However, between 2000 and 2016, melting glaciers was almost twice as fast as before. The amount of ice that disappeared in average reached eight billion tons per year.

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