Scientists in China have warned that shrinking glaciers in the Tibetan plateau will lead to an ecological catastrophe.
Our China correspondent, John Taylor, says a team of 20 scientists from China and the United States have been studying glaciers in western China’s Qinghai-Tibet plateau.
They discovered the glaciers are shrinking at an unprecedented pace.
The state newspaper the China Daily reports that in the past 40 years the glaciers have been melting by an average of 7 per cent annually, but that shrinkage has worsened since the early 1990s.
China’s chief glaciologist blames global warming and warns if global warming continues, most glaciers in the region may disappear by 2010 .
He says the full-scale shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.
