Climate Change in Himalaya

The 3-month long assignment has come to the end, but the journey with the Himalayas never ends. Writing this blog is just like a self-paced trekking deep into the Himalayas, along with the magnificent landscape and incredible flora and fauna, the environmental change is also taking place in the Third Pole in recent decades. Natural climate variability and increased human activities are known to have contributed to glacial environment change, forest degradation, floods and GLOFs, landcover and biodiversity loss associated with ecosystem disturbance, which in turn affects the global climate system regulation and leads to vulnerabilities in social-economic developments at many levels. Before it is too late, more attention and actions with precise steps are needed from governments, research institutions, NGOs, local communities, you, me and everyone, to safeguard the Himalayan environment and human well-being. I will keep this blog open for more discoveries along the journey in the Himalay...

Black Carbon (BC) has a  noticeable   history  over the past 150 years in Hindu-Kush-Himalayan (HKH) and Tibetan Plateau (TP),  from pre-industry to modern periods. An analysis  on Mt. Everest ice core during 1860–2000 and based on  Single Particle Soot Photometer  demonstrates that BC concentration from 1975-2000 shows about 3-fold increase compared to the background level of 1860-1975, indicating BC from anthropogenic source has been introduced and transported to highland of Himalayas.   What is black carbon BC is derived from incomplete combustion of organic matter from both natural and anthropogenic sources, in the form of carbonaceous aerosols, heating the  aerosol-planetary boundary layer  with a net warming effect  by absorbing and scattering sunlight. BC can also be deposited onto snow and ice, darkening the surfaces and reducing their albedo feedback . Both mechanisms ar...