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JAKARTA: Indonesia’s little-known glacier could disappear as early as 2025, the Meteorological, Climatology, and Geophysics Company BMKG mentioned on Sunday, with rising temperatures having accelerated the melting of the ice.
The tropical glacier, considered one of a handful left on the planet, lies on a mountain close to Puncak Jaya in Indonesia’s easternmost province of Papua. It has undergone a fast lack of ice protection and thickness prior to now twenty years that would result in the snow utterly disappearing in just some years’ time.
The Papuan glacier is remnant of glaciers which have existed for round 5,000 years, researchers mentioned. It is without doubt one of the few remaining tropical glaciers, with others positioned in South America and Africa.
Dodo Gunawan, who heads BMKG’s local weather change division, informed Arab Information: “The snow on Puncak Jaya will vanish quickly. That is occurring due to world warming.”
“As a result of temperatures on the peak have already elevated, it might not maintain the snow to compact down into the glacier.”
Although the glacier has been melting for years, rising world temperatures and diminished rainfall that has been exacerbated by El Nino — a phenomenon that causes tropical ocean water and atmospheric temperatures to get hotter — has sped up the thinning of the glacier.
Donaldi Permana, the company’s deputy director local weather and air high quality analysis, mentioned across the starting of the economic revolution, in 1850, the whole glacier space on the Puncak Jaya mountain vary was estimated at round 20 sq km. By 2002, ice protection within the space had decreased to round 2 sq km, and was recorded at 0.34 sq km by Might 2020.
The thickness of the glacier has been vastly diminished since 2010, when it was at 32 meters, to 22 meters in 2016. The ice thinned to round 8 meters by 2021.
“Underneath these circumstances, between 2025 and 2027, it’s doubtless that the ice will vanish,” Permana informed Arab Information.
Tropical glaciers are extremely delicate indicators and recorders of local weather change, in keeping with the World Meteorological Group.
The disappearance of the snow-capped peaks in Papua wouldn’t solely imply the lack of a uncommon web site for Indonesia, however may also have an effect on the fauna and flora within the space, a facet that Permana mentioned researchers nonetheless must discover additional.
It should even be an enormous cultural loss for the native Papuan neighborhood.
“Culturally, there are native tribes round Puncak Jaya who contemplate the glacier as a sacred web site. The ice’s disappearance will have an effect on them,” Permana mentioned.
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