Himalayan glaciers in the balance

摘要

The Himalayas continue to be interesting to glaciologists, which is not surprising when one considers the formidable water-resource problems in the glaciers' regional context and the controversy over the rate at which the ice is disappearing. The claim that the glaciers are vanishing rapidly is not difficult to discredit. In the Karakoram, at the western end of the Himalayan arc, glacier mass balance - the change of glacier mass over a given time span - has, in fact, been slightly positive over the past decade.