NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Imagine a world without drinking water.
It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source.
The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.
But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.
A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.
The Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, India's holiest river, is retreating 75 feet a year. And the Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has lost more than 3 miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/09/himalayan.glaciers.reut/index.html
It's a scary thought, but scientists say the 40 percent of humanity living in South Asia and China could well be living with little drinking water within 50 years as global warming melts Himalayan glaciers, the region's main water source.
The glaciers supply 303.6 million cubic feet every year to Asian rivers, including the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, the Ganga in India, the Indus in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh and Burma's Irrawaddy.
But as global warming increases, the glaciers have been rapidly retreating, with average temperatures in the Himalayas up 1 degree Celsius since the 1970s.
A World Wide Fund report published in March said a quarter of the world's glaciers could disappear by 2050 and half by 2100.
The Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganga, India's holiest river, is retreating 75 feet a year. And the Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, where Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent of Everest, has lost more than 3 miles since they climbed the mountain in 1953.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/09/himalayan.glaciers.reut/index.html
