According to the rating of the decade’s main scientific discoveries, the first place is given to the proofs demonstrating that glaciers are indeed melting at an accelerated pace: first of all, this is made obvious by a considerable decrease of their area, which persuasively shows increased global warming.
The UN is disturbed by the fact that the pace of glacier melting on the planet has doubled in the past several years, which can lead to the demise of some ecosystems and climate change. According to the UN data, in 1980–99 an average glacier melting pace was 0.3 meter per year; it reached the level of 0.5 meter by 2000 and by now has accelerated to 1.5 meters. Glaciers melt the fastest in Europe: Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Italy, and Spain.
Glaciologists say the Swiss glaciers are receding so fast that most of them can disappear already this century. According to the studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, 1,500 glaciers lost a few dozen cubic kilometers of ice in 1999–2008, which is about 13 percent.
According to data scientists have, higher temperatures in the past 50 years have caused glaciers in Tajikistan to lose one-third of their volume. The Pamir ice formations have degraded especially significantly. The tendency is very dangerous, since the melting of the Pamir glaciers will lead to water shortage and mass migration of the population in Central Asia.
Considerable glacier decrease rates are also registered in the Caucasus: in the past 50 years they shrank by 16 percent.
It is known that 70 percent of glaciers in the Andes, which cross the territory of seven Southern American countries, are located on the territory of Peru. For the past 30 years they lost a fifth part of their area because of climate warming: if no immediate measures are taken, by 2015 all glaciers located lower than 5,500 meters above sea level will disappear from the continent. It is clear that all this will also result in catastrophic consequences for Amazonia.
Glacier melting in the Himalayas threatens with an ecological catastrophe in India, China, and Nepal. Over the past 30 years the area of glaciers there has decreased by 10 percent (from 48,860 square kilometers in the 1970s to 44,438 square kilometers in recent years). The current tendency in glacier melting suggests that the big rivers of India and China can become seasonal rivers in the near future: at first this melting process will provoke heavy floods along the major rivers in India and China, but in a few decades the water level in the rivers fed by glaciers will drop considerably.
The glaciers of Kilimanjaro (the highest African peak, 5,895 m) have recently been melting fast. The Ohio State University professor Lonnie Thompson together with his colleagues came to the conclusion that the Kilimanjaro glaciers are melting because of an increase in the average temperature in troposphere. Whereas in 1912–53 the glaciers area decreased approximately by one percent per year, later the process accelerated considerably, and in 1989–2007 they shrank by 2.5 percent per year. By 2007 the area of the Kilimanjaro glaciers decreased by almost 85 percent (as compared to 1912): from 12 square kilometers to two square kilometers.
According to Prof. Thompson’s calculations, since 2000 the thickness of glaciers has been also decreasing fast: in the northern part it decreased by two meters, and in the southern part, by five meters. If this tendency in climate change continues, the glaciers in this unique part of Tanzania landscape will entirely disappear by approximately 2033.
What consequences can this entail? Climate-caused melting of glaciers from the Himalayas to the Andes can lead in the next couple of decades to climate change and the disappearance of some ecosystems. It can also disrupt water supply and cause associated problems in hydropower production and field irrigation. All this will significantly influence the lives of billions of people.
The idea of glacier protection (first of all in Kilimanjaro) from melting can be realized in different ways:
1. By means of a satellite on a specially calculated elliptic orbit, elongated in the direction of the Sun. This shading device will revolve around the Earth almost on the plane of the Earth’s equator with a period equal to the duration of the Earth’s revolution around its axis, so that its “hovering” (that is being actually in the straight line between the Sun and the mountain) in the most scorching daytime hours is as long as possible. (The diameter of the Sun is 1,392,000 km; its distance to the Earth, from 147,000,000 km to 152,000,000 km. Mount Kilimanjaro is 5,895 km high; it rises 300 km above the equator).
In order to implement the project, an Earth satellite should be sent to space and a kind of umbrella assembled, a platform in the form of an ellipsis or parallelogram (from nanotechnological solar battery panels and tinted protective films with the use of up-to-date materials that combine various characteristics). Situated perpendicularly to the rays of the Sun, it would be able to not only screen (or artificially “overcast” by means of chemical substances dispersion and change of physical and chemical characteristics in rarefied atmosphere) a certain area of the Earth (two to three kilometers for now) from direct solar rays, but also perform other “space” tasks (communication, “space power station,” a part of the global positioning system (GPS), etc.).
2. The requirements set to the orbit parameters (its period and radius) of this kind of space umbrella can be greatly simplified if it “leaves” and keeps an artificial trail (similar to a comet “tail”) made of safe chemical substances, particles of dust, droplets, and ice crystals, i.e., by means of a kind of “silver cloud” formation.
3. The idea can also be realized using “space elevators,” which currently have been actively developed by scientists (in this case humankind will have a possibility to transform the Earth in the future into a global greenhouse with artificial climate and air purification systems);
4. Glaciers can be protected also using “terrestrial” methods: creating artificial clouds, “provoking” new snowfalls, covering the glaciers and bare rocks with white protective films or “solar battery” panels, launching air balloons or flying “kites,” etc.
The project we are proposing can be realized by means of up-to-date technologies. It is proved, for example, by the operation of the American-European solar observatory NASA/ESA SOHO, from which the Sun is observed (it revolves directly between the Earth and the Sun in a perfect location – in the L1Lagrange point, which is in a kind of balancing point; staying there requires minimal energy consumption), development of space power stations and GPS systems, etc. It is clear that engineers, physicists, and material scientists should be involved in the project.
Let us save the snows of Kilimanjaro! The National Space Agency of Ukraine could offer such a project (as an international one) to resolve the global warming problems at first to protect the snows of Kilimanjaro (at present only about two square kilometers are left!) and engage Russia, the USA, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and so on. The developed methods of space object delivery to a specified orbit and their orientation systems, new developments in the sphere of nanotechnologies, and achievements in the cloud formation research make it possible to start implementing this international project in practice immediately, since any delay with its realization will lead to irreversible climate changes.
The Day ’S FACTFILE
Pavlo BILOSHYTSKY is a pathophysiologist, mathematician, Doctor of Medical Sciences (1983), and laureate of Ukraine’s State Award for Science and Technology (2000). He is an academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Life Protection. He was the first doctor in the USSR who obtained the specialty “space physiology” (1964).
Biloshytsky has authored some 300 research works, monographs, and inventions in the domain of aerospace; extreme, mountain, and sports medicine; mathematical biology; and bioinformatics. He is the founder of the program “The flag of Ukraine on the world summits” (1990) and the champion of Ukraine in mountaineering in the high-altitude and age-specific class (1997).
Biloshytsky is familiar with the problems of global warming not only from literature – he personally observed the glaciers that are now melting faster than ever before and repeatedly visited all the mountain regions which he describes.
