Daniel A. Metraux
News Leader
January 10, 2015
Recently I watched a news feature on television on the future of land-based glaciers. The message was clear— these glaciers are melting rapidly and will be gone well within the next century.
Fifty years ago I explored a huge ice formation within the lofty confines of Glacier National Park in Montana, but today all that is left is bare ground. Glaciers that dominate Greenland are receding year by year and will be mostly if not totally gone when my great-grandchildren may be entering college. The loss of these mountains of ice may not have a great effect on Canada and the United States, but the consequences for China and India will be grave indeed.
Today the total population of China and India accounts for roughly a third or more of all humanity. The greatest crisis both nations will face in the future is a lack of fresh water. China’s case is especially dire. Today China has 22 percent of the world population but only 7 percent of the world’s water. Most of the rivers and lakes in China are badly polluted and once major supplies of groundwater near places like Beijing are being bled dry. I once became quite ill in China’s capital when I carelessly brushed my teeth using tap water in our supposedly fashionable hotel.
Much of the water that feeds the great rivers of China and India comes from the jagged mountains of western China, Tibet and northern India. The Yellow River starts as a small mountain stream in the Tibetan Highlands and is even today a roaring river as it descends the mountains and heads towards eastern China. The river is fed by the spring and summer thaw that melts these mountain glaciers. Before global warming, cold winter precipitation enlarged these glaciers, thus creating a natural balance that allowed for the unimpeded flow of these major rivers.
Unfortunately, the massive air pollution that today blankets China and India has given rise to rapidly rising temperatures even amid the highest peaks of the Himalayas. Scientists predict that within a century these glaciers will be gone or at least severely diminished. The disappearance of the mountain glaciers will starve the rivers of China. One sees this already. The expansive river that flowed under the famed Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing where the bitter war between Japan and China began in 1937 is today totally gone—an ugly dry riverbed.
Nations cannot survive without water. That is a big danger signal that China and India must face as their water supplies melt into nothingness.
The writer is a professor of Asian studies at Mary Baldwin College.
