New images show 50 years of climate change in the Himalayas | Environment | guardian.co.uk

New images show 50 years of climate change in the Himalayas | Environment | guardian.co.uk: "Captured on camera: 50 years of climate change in the Himalayas

Series of before and after panoramas of Imja glacier taken five decades apart highlights dramatic reduction of Himalayan ice

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* Felicity Carus
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 June 2009 17.00 BST
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Himalayan glaciers disappear as world warms up: Imja glacierView larger picture

A very deep layer of ice covered the Imja glacier in the 1950s (top photo). Over the next 50 years, small meltwater ponds continued to grow and merge, and by the mid 1970s had formed the Imja lake. By 2007, the lake had grown to around 1km long. Photograph: Erwin Schneider/Alton Byers/The Mountain Institute

When Fritz Müller and Erwin Schneider battled ice storms, altitude sickness and snow blindness in the 1950s to map, measure and photograph the Imja glacier in the Himalayas, they could never have foreseen that the gigantic tongue of millennia-old glacial ice would be reduced to a lake within 50 years.

But half a century later, American mountain geographer Alton Byers returned to the precise locations of the original pictures and replicated 40 panoramas taken by explorers Müller and Schneider. Placed t"