A glacier park in Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on January 13, 2025 (XINHUA) 

Twenty thousand years ago, Manny the woolly mammoth, Sid the sloth, and Diego the saber-toothed tiger—the heroes of the 2002 animated film Ice Age—trekked across frozen landscapes to avoid a forthcoming ice age. Today, polar animals are facing a threat in the opposite direction, the disappearance of glaciers. 

Glaciers, often referred to as Earth's thermostat for their role in regulating global climate, are melting at an alarming rate. According to the World Meteorological Organization, five of the past six years have seen most rapid glacier retreat on record and glaciers in many regions will not survive the 21st century.

In response to climate change, the UN General Assembly declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and established

March 21 as the World Day for Glaciers—a wake-up call to humanity about these icy giants' critical role in maintaining climate stability and freshwater supply, now under threat.

"The establishment of the World Day for Glaciers serves a dual purpose: It not only raises public awareness about glacier conservation on a global scale, but also urges governments to give higher priority to future glacial changes. This further promotes research and international collaboration in glacial studies—such as investigating ice-water-vapor transformation processes and their climatic impacts," Yang Wei, a research fellow at the Institute of the Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told Beijing Review.

Devastating degradation 

A glacier is a large mass of perennial ice formed by the accumulation and transformation of solid precipitation, and shows evidence of past or present flow. Modern glaciers worldwide, including ice sheets and mountain glaciers, cover about 10 percent of Earth's land area and store nearly 70 percent of the planet's freshwater.

Recent research published in Nature magazine reveals that between 2000 and 2023, Earth has lost approximately 5 percent of its glacier mass—equivalent to 6.542 trillion tons. The melting is showing continued signs of sharp acceleration, with 548 billion tons of ice vanishing in 2023 alone.

This trend spans nearly every region. The Chacaltaya glacier in the Andes had disappeared entirely by 2009, and Venezuela lost its last glacier, La Corona, in 2023. Over the past two decades, Central Europe has seen 39 percent of its glaciers disappear. According to a global forecast, if global temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, over 80 percent of the world's glaciers could be lost.

The mountain glaciers in west China showed an increasing trend of melting, and the degradation of perennial permafrost along the Qinghai-Xizang Highway is obvious, read the Blue Book on Climate Change of China, an official document released by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) in 2024.

This could lead to a variety of environmental crises—the disappearance of glaciers threatens water security for billions of people, endangers mountain and river ecosystems, and could also devastate natural reserves and tourism-dependent economies in coastal regions worldwide.

Yang said he believes the ultimate solution to treating glacier loss lies in reducing carbon emissions.

"From a global perspective, accelerated glacier melting is primarily driven by global warming. As global glaciers continue to shrink, concerted international efforts are urgently needed to reduce energy consumption, cut carbon emissions and limit global temperature rise—the only viable path to mitigating glacial loss," Yang said.

Beyond broad energy conservation and emission reduction efforts, Yang believes academic research on glaciers can significantly slow melting and mitigate its risks. "China's glacier monitoring system still requires improvement, especially in understanding glacial change processes,

mechanism and protection strategies in extremely high-altitude regions," Yang said. "For instance, while we've made progress in assessing glacier-related disaster risks like ice avalanches and glacial lake outburst floods, we urgently need greater investment to deepen studies in glacial change mechanisms and their impacts. Only through this research can we effectively implement artificial preservation measures for high-economic-value glaciers."

Shoring up efforts 

China's glaciers are mainly distributed across six provinces and autonomous regions: Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Xizang Autonomous Region, and Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. Of these, the glacier area on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau reaches 47,000 square km, accounting for 80 percent of the country's total glacier area, according to the ITP. This makes the plateau the most extensive glacier-covered region in China.

From 1985 to 2020, the overall area of glaciers on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau decreased by 18 percent, with a reduction rate of 414.8 square km per year, said Zhang Xingying, Deputy Director of the Department of Science and Climate Change at the CMA.

At this year's Two Sessions, annual meetings of China's top legislature, the National People's Congress, and the top political advisory body, the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Zhang, also a member of the CPPCC National Committee, proposed that the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau is a critical area for climate anomalies and changes in China. As over the past 30 years, the overall area of glaciers on the plateau has shown a retreating trend, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of a monitoring system for the plateau and establish glacier protection areas.

"The glacial changes in the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau exhibit distinct spatial and temporal differences between the north and south. On a spatial scale, the most dramatic changes have occurred in the southeastern part of the plateau, followed by the southern edge of the Himalayas," Yang said.

An advocate for the protection of ecological environment, China has begun to plan and implement measures to protect the glaciers on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau.

"Currently, some measures have been taken to preserve glaciers on the plateau, such as prohibiting tourists from approaching glaciers beyond a certain distance and increasing environmental protection actions and awareness," Yang said. In terms of technology, the precision of remote sensing in China has improved rapidly. High-resolution remote sensing can be used for glacier change research. In particular, the recent applications of SAR (segmentation and reassembly) and stereoscopic image pairs have significantly enhanced the study of glacier changes. Field surveys, remote sensing and unmanned aerial vehicles to grasp the regional distribution, resource reserves, and changes in ice volume, thereby providing an accurate plan for future preservation, Yang added. 

China has also played an important role in promoting international cooperation on glacier protection. The ITP has collaborated with the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology to establish multiple glacier monitoring stations in the Mount Qomolangma region, collecting data on glacier thickness, area and temperature.

"The satellite remote sensing technology and glacier monitoring equipment provided by China have greatly enhanced Nepal's capabilities in glacier research," Rijan Bhakta Kayastha, a glaciologist at the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, said at the International Symposium on Himalayan Glaciers and Water Resources in 2020.

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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