These glaciers are growing

Two UNO professors have discovered that some glaciers in Pakistan are growing in size — a discovery that could toss them into the center of a climate-change controversy.

Jack Shroder and Michael Bishop will present their government-funded report Friday at a national conference in San Francisco, likely shocking other geologists because most of the world's glaciers are melting.

But Shroder, a longtime geology professor, wants to be clear: He thinks the glaciers that the research team studied are probably growing because of global warming, not despite it.

The discovery doesn't disprove climate change, said Shroder, who has studied the western Himalayas for decades. Rather, it could help scientists better understand the effects of global warming.

“We're not headed into conspiracy land here,” Shroder said. “People have to remember that climate change doesn't always march monolithically in one direction.”

News of the research is beginning to leak into science publications. “Science” magazine, for instance, mentioned the as-yet unpublished University of Nebraska at Omaha research in a November story about the debate over Himalayan glaciers.

The UNO research team will attract more attention Friday, when Shroder and Bishop give their presentation at the American Geophysical Union's annual conference.

What they'll present is decades in the making: Shroder first received federal funding to study Afghanistan's geography and geology in 1977, and he has taken 20 research trips to Pakistan since then.

Using a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Shroder and Bishop and a team of graduate students trekked to a group of glaciers clustered around K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, in 2005.

What they found was startling: Their on-the-ground research and satellite images show that many of the glaciers are growing in the rugged, mostly uninhabited region on the Pakistani-Chinese border.

That's startling in part because glaciers around Mount Everest in the eastern Himalayas are shrinking rapidly — in fact, “receding faster than in any other part of the world,” according to a United Nations panel on climate change.

One of China's foremost glacier experts recently told the Los Angeles Times that the largest glacier on Yulong Snow Mountain in southern China had retreated 275 yards since 1982.

“At this rate, the glacier could disappear entirely over the next few decades,” said He Yanqing, the Chinese expert.

Scientists have long warned that the melting of Himalayan glaciers could take a heavy human toll — massive floods, then the drying up of glacier-fed rivers, and finally a severe water shortage for the billion-plus people who rely on those rivers.

The UNO researchers don't dispute these dangers — but they are also certain that the glaciers in northeast Pakistan are growing even as other Himalayan glaciers shrink.

The researchers aren't sure why the glaciers around K2 are growing, Shroder said.

A working theory, he said, is that the warming of the Atlantic Ocean is causing more evaporation, which leads to increased wintertime moisture that freezes onto the glaciers.

But the scientists don't know why moisture would increase in the mountainous areas of Pakistan but not in neighboring Afghanistan, where the glaciers aren't growing, Shroder said.

The geologists plan to return to the area next year. This time they will cross the Chinese border to visit new glaciers, determine whether they are growing and, if so, run ion tests to discover where any increased moisture is coming from.

It isn't the first time, and probably not the last, that Shroder will venture into dangerous territory in order to do research.

The 70-year-old professor spent decades of his career figuring out how to get into and out of Afghanistan even after it was invaded by the Soviets and later overrun by the Taliban.

In the late 1970s, the Red Army put the UNO geologist under house arrest in Kabul for three months before finally allowing him to board a plane out of Afghanistan.

Shroder achieved brief fame in intelligence circles when he snuck from Kabul to the Salang Pass in northern Afghanistan in the 1980s. There, he took photos of North Korean troops who had crossed the border to support the Red Army — knowledge that American intelligence agencies didn't have until Shroder handed over the photos.

Now the veteran professor is bracing himself for a potential backlash when the UNO team's research paper comes out in the next few weeks.

The research team is worried that climate change critics will seize on the Himalayan glacier research as proof that the Earth isn't warming after all.

Because of that potential controversy, Bishop is declining to comment.

“We've just been waiting for somebody to say global warming is over,” Shroder said. “No, no, no, no, no. It's much more complicated than that.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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