A distant view of Urumqi River source Glacier No. 1 in the Tianshan Mountains in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Today, climate experts are warning the world that Earth's cryosphere is decreasing and Earth's atmosphere is causing the "greenhouse effect."

Indeed, due to global warming, over 80% of the world's glaciers are receding, and the volume of water resources is decreasing. Moreover, global warming also contributes to rising sea levels, and leads to extreme events such as ice-snow melt floods, ice collapses and avalanches, influencing global ecological balance.

If left unchecked, the ongoing thawing of glaciers could result in irreversible loss, leading to their complete disappearance.

To delve into the status quo and future planning of glacier protection in China, China News Release reporters made a special interview with Wang Feiteng, a researcher of the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and head of CAS' Tianshan Glaciological Station.

Glaciers in China

China has 48,571 glaciers covering over 50,000 square kilometers in the west region. Particularly, around 80% of China's mountain glaciers are small, with the area less than 1 square kilometer, which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate warming.

As the world's only country that has fully completed glacier inventory, China, based on the status quo of glaciers, has twice completed the Glacier Inventory of China in the 1960s–1970s period and 2010. A comparison of the two datasets reveals an increase in the number of glaciers from 46,377 to 48,571, but the area of glaciers decreased by about 18%.

Four factors contribute to these changes: First, the rising temperature during the ablation period impedes the accumulation of glacial mass on the surface, leading to increased melting, and when the temperature rises to a certain height, the proportion of solid precipitation will drop, resulting in further loss of glacial mass; second, the increase of temperature of the glacier body reduces the heat needed for heating the glacier surface to melting point and infiltration volume of refreezing, making the glacier more sensitive to climate warming; third, the growing area of melted glaciers, combined with the concentration of light-absorbing substances on the surface of glaciers such as black carbon, cryoconite and mineral dust, lowers the glacial surface albedo; and fourth, increased glacier fragmentation exacerbates melting by expanding melted areas and allowing water to penetrate deeper into the glacier, intensifying the heat transfer process. The interactions of these factors made glaciers even more sensitive and accelerated the speed of melting.