Tibet: Plateau in Peril Michael Zhao and Orville Schell

Michael Zhao, a graduate of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is a documentary producer at the Asia Society's Center on U.S. -China Relations. Orville Schell, former dean of the U. C. Berkeley Graduate School ofJournalism, is currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S. -China Relations and author of 14 hooks, nine of which are ahout China. Tibet: Plateau in Peril Michael Zhao and Orville Schell Over the past six months, demonstrations China triumphantly capped the success- in Tibetan ethnic areas of China and the on- ful Beijing Olympic Games by winning the going negotiations between representatives most gold medals of any country. But other- of the Dalai Lama in India and Chinese gov- wise 2008 hasn't been an entirely lucky year ernment officials in Beijing have given for the rising world power. China registered Tibet a higher profile than at any time over a record number of earthquakes, from the the last decade. But beyond politics, there is headline-making Sichuan Province monster another even more important crisis brewing jolt that killed 80,000 people and triggered on the Tibetan Plateau: a looming environ- 13,000 aftershocks, to smaller, more recent mental meltdown. tremors in Tibet, Yunnan, and, yet again, in Over the next 25 years the "roof of the Sichuan. world," where most of Asia's great rivers These temblors have one thing in com- find their headwaters, could well deliver mon: they struck around the edges of the an ecological crisis to Asia's billions of peo- Tibetan Plateau, a tectonic plate that was ple. With glaciers melting away faster than pushed skyward millions of years ago by the anyone predicted, the people of China, upthrusting Indian subcontinent to form South Asia, and Southeast Asia are con- the earth's highest mountain range, the fronting the prospect of diminished water Himalayas. resources. For, while irregular river flows The Indian Plate, moving like a wedge, may be accelerated in the near term by the heaved the plateau to new heights and melting ice, the long-term flows would be continues to slowly push the "roof of the diminished. world" to the northeast, pressing down on We've already seen early signs on the the Sichuan basin and other lower-elevation Tibetan Plateau of the effects of warming- mountainous areas in China's midwest and glaciers retreating, permafrost thawing, southwest. It is these plate tectonics that grassland degradation, and desertification. have caused the recent earthquakes. There's real reason to heed these signals Such seismological events can be as grave warnings of far more disturbing devastating. But climate change, elevated consequences to come that will have a temperatures, melting glaciers, and chang- global significance over the next several ing weather patterns on the Tibetan Plateau decades. could have much larger and more long-term © 2008 World Policy Institute 171 ecological consequences than all potential tion of the plateau's ecosystem and disrupt earthquakes combined. reliable sources of downriver water supply Earthquakes are, of course, impossible for much of the continent. to predict with any accuracy. But our chang- Sitting at the geographical center of ing climate is demonstrating its shifting Asia, the Tibetan Plateau, though inhabited patterns in many obvious ways. And on this by no more than a few million largely no- fabled miles-high plateau a clear warning madic people, is the size of Western Europe. bell is sounding what's in store for the Home to the Himalaya, Kunlun, and other planet's future climate, if we only take the lofty mountain ranges, the plateau is the time to listen. Melting glaciers and per- source of most of the continent's great river mafrost have over-fed rivers, lakes, and systems: the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, wetlands in some areas, producing more Salween, Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Indus, frequent floods. In the northern part of the to name the most important. The nearly plateau, however, warmer temperatures and 60,000 square kilometers (14.8 million uneven rainfall distribution, coupled with acres) of glaciers in China, mostly on the overgrazing, have at the same time shrunk Tibetan Plateau, comprise the largest ice rivers and lakes, and parched dry previously mass outside the polar regions. It is these lush pastures, turning them into sand dunes glaciers that feed the headwaters of these or degraded lands. Moreover, scientists and mighty rivers, that in turn serve as a major environmentalists are increasingly concerned water source for 2 billion people at lower about this once-isolated region's importance elevations. to much of the rest of Asia. Yao Tandong, "You can think of these glaciers as a wa- one of China's leading glaciologists, is ter bank account that's been built up over concerned that what is happening on the thousands of years," explains Dr. Lonnie plateau could "ultimately bring about an Thompson, a professor of glaciology at Ohio immeasurable ecological crisis." According State University at Columbus who has done to his research, glaciers in Asia's higher alti- research on the Tibetan Plateau for many tudes, mostly in China, have shrunk 7 per- years. "During the twentieth century and in cent in size over the last 40 years. And in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the next 25 years, they will melt even faster. we have been taking more out of that bank account than we have put in," Thompson Asia's Water Tower observes. "We know that, long-term.. .that China and India today worry about the bank account will be gone." problems of water pollution, but what if The Quelccaya Ice Cap, on the Andes there's no water left to pollute in the Mountains in Peru where Thompson has decades ahead? drilled ice cores since 1978, has lost 25 per- Let's look at the scale of the problem we cent of its size in 30 years. The melt rate face. Simply put, the Tibetan Plateau's envi- has gone up ten-fold in the past three ronmental crisis is a 2-billion-person prob- decades, receding from six meters per year lem. With a population of 4 billion, Asia is in the first 15 years to 60 meters a year in home to 60 percent of humanity. As half the last 15, according to measurements of the Asian population rely on the mighty taken by Thompson's team. river systems for water-for drinking, irri- The experience of researching and moni- gation for agriculture, industry, and hy- toring glaciers in Tibet, Peru, and other re- dropower-the dramatic shrinking of gla- gions has made Thompson feel like a doctor ciers and permafrost will cause a degrada- seeing ill patients getting sicker year after 172 WORLD POLICYJOURNAL * FALL 2008 -, *,.L•_ 4r Ae Bottoms up. The source of drinking water for two billion people. year. The situation has become so severe Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of that Peru, once 80 percent dependent on Sciences. A 33-year veteran of glacial stud- hydropower, has now had to build coal-fired ies, he is known affectionately as "Uncle plants to make up for the shortfall in its Iceman." Thanks to mounting attention to power output during the dry season, when global warming and increasingly generous its hydroelectric turbines run as low as 20 government investments in the field of percent of capacity. Everywhere Thompson glaciology, Yan is now busy overseeing a goes, he finds glaciers shrinking, retreating, small army of researchers who are trying to and thinning at faster rates than he origi- understand better the full environmental nally imagined. consequences of a warming plateau. They On Mt. Naimona'nyi, 6,100 meters are also trying to understand not only its above sea level in the Himalayas, where causes, but to figure out how to deal with Thompson's team of American and Chinese the problem over the next quarter century colleagues drilled an ice core, they expected and beyond. to find two tell-tale radiation-tainted layers Yao told China's state-run Xinhua News created by American and Russian nuclear Agency, "The retreat over the last 30 years tests in 1951 and 1962. Instead, they dis- equals the previous 200 years combined." covered that the glaciers showed no net He predicts that by 2100, half of China's ice-mass accumulation at all from snowfall glaciers will have disappeared. during the past half-century. Yao and his colleagues have discovered Yan Tandong worked in Thompson's lab that, until the first half of last century, in Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1980s. He China's glaciers were expanding. But during went on to found the Institute of Tibetan 1950s and '60s, a large-scale retreat began. Tibet: Plateau in Peril 1.73 Then, during the late 1960s and into the utilizes 7,100 anti-aircraft guns, 4,991 '70s, research recorded a modest net accu- rocket launchers, and roughly 30 aircraft to mulation as more glaciers expanded than re- fire silver-iodide shells into cloud forma- treated. But entering the 1980s, glaciers tions in an attempt to induce more rainfall again started shrinking, this time with and increase runoff into lakes and rivers. alarming rapidity. Since the 1990s, scien- Standing at the first bridge across the tists have observed an "all out" retreat, with Yellow River in Madoi County, Qinghai an overwhelming majority of glaciers begin- Province, a vast, high grassland area of the ning to shrink. Tibetan Plateau, one would never imagine Each year, glaciers in China have been that the quiet, steady, and crystal clear melting away at the equivalent rate of the stream-fed by drop after drop of centuries- entire annual runoff of the Yellow River, ac- old melted ice-could become one of Asia's cording to Yao.

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