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China: Qinghai-Tibet Glaciers Said Shrinking Due to Global Warming
[WTN-L World Tibet Network News. Published by The Canada Tibet Committee. Issue ID: 01/06/11; June 11, 2001.]
BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Jun 10, 2001.
Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency).
Xining, 10 June: Owing to global warming and deterioration of the environment, glaciers at Mount Qilian on China's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are shrinking at an annual rate of between two and 16 metres in recent years.
As a result, the flow of the Heihe River, China's second largest inland river which originates from Mount Qilian, reduced by 16.8 per cent since the early 1950s, affecting production of 1,000 industrial firms and crops on 266,000 ha of land in the Hexi Corridor in northwest China's Gansu Province.
Mount Qilian borders Qinghai and Gansu Provinces for a total length of 800 km and has an elevation of 4,000 metres on average. The mountain range has 3,200 glaciers with hundreds of millions cubic metres of snow.
Shrinkage of glaciers and ascension of the snowline have led to less sources of water for over 40 rivers originating from Mount Qilian.