00:01

Every third person on the planet depends on these water reserves. But even here the effects of climate change can be felt: the Himalayas are too warm. The glaciers here are melting faster than those in Europe. And the effects are starting to reach us.

00:20

Drops fall into India’s holy river – the Ganges – which has it’s source here at the foot of the Chorabari glacier.

00:21

The Indian glaciologist D. P. Dobhal was one of the first to point out the rapid melting of the ice. The Chorabari glacier has been melting at double its usual rate for the past ten years.

00:45

D.P. Dobhal 

„The glacier is receeding by between 8 and 10 metres per year. We are having milder and milder winters and longer summers. The thaw is taking longer and longer. And there is decreased snow-fall in the winter months. So we have a negative balance.“

01:06

The scientists are preparing to take their mneasurements for 2010. They bore channels in the ice using steam – about a dozen around the glacier. These channels are several metres deep and when they are made bamboo tubes are pushed through them. This is an efficient way of working out the total loss of mass. By how much will the ice sheet have shrunk this time? 

01:29

The glacier lies like a river on its bed. It is easy to see by the walls at its sides that the ice was once much taller. The glacier is 6 kilometers long. This top third comprises the growth zone, where new ice should be made from snow deposits...

01:45

O-T Dr. Dobhal

„You can see that the mountains are totally clear. In the past, ten, twenty years ago, a thick blanket of snow covered these mountains. But now there’s nothing left. We’ve had hardly any snow this year." 

02:07

If the glacier is not to disappear completely, this place should be covered in snow and ice, metres thick. And yet glacial cracks are lying open, melting away at an alarming rate. And that’s not all.

02:21

Dobhal shows us in the top right ice-field that the glacier has broken into little pieces which is speeding up the melting process further. Where there ought to be a thick ice crust, there is now a stream flowing down the rock-face.

02:40

O-T Dobhal "Our glacier is constantly loosing mass – and this will be a problem in the near future.“

02:48

And not just a problem for India. Ten of the world’s biggest rivers have their source here in the Himalayas. 6000 glaciers flood the Ganges alone with their melt-water. 80 percent of its torrents are made up of ice-water. Rock particles, ground down by the glacier, sparkle in the river.

 03:09

Currently the water levels are rising thanks to the melt-water. But over the next twenty years the scientists expect less and less to flow from the mountains.

03:21

500 million people are completely dependant on the Ganges.(Pause) They use it for drinking water and they grow their crops on the fertile fields by the river.

03:42

Over the coming years there will be an increased risk of flooding, and later famine and drought could threaten the lives of these people. The water is still flowing, but the Ganges is already over-used. There are numerous canals branching off from the river, taking the water to distant regions for agriculture.

03:52

When the glaciers are gone, there will be no water here. The fields will dry up. And the farmers are not farming for India alone, but the global market.

03:28

They are already heavily dependent on the Ganges– even the Monsoon rains are not what they used to be. They were not enough for irrigation this year.

04:14

O-T Gobindh Singh

„When the Ganges dries up, so will everything else here. Without the Ganges everything would die."  

04:25

China has been just as badly affected as India.In the leading Insitute for Global Glacier Monitoring in Zurich, scientists are comparing data of the same glaciers in 1990 and 2000. The glaciers that feed into the Chinese river Yangtse, are melting too.

04:44

Leave background noise „are draining into Tibet, into China

04:45

Here you can see that huge lakes are forming on top of the glaciers. Where there was a lot of snow in 1990, by 2000 there was no more snowfall – and no new ice.

05:00

O-T Dr. Paul

„Very little snow, no deposits... Glaciers as big as this one cannot continue to exist and will simply melt away." 

05:31

It is high time that politics did something about this. Professor Fischlin from the Federal Technical University Zurich, is one of the leading scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 05:42

Blurb: Name, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nobel Peace Prize 2007  

O-T Fischlin: „Copenhagen has to be a success otherwise the glaciers will dissappear in a few decades... We must help India to develop its green technologies." 

06:17

Green technology for all this?: car traffic in India is becoming more and more congested. There are fewer and fewer constraints on carbon fuels. 750 million Indians are burning Biomass and waste products and rubbish are just incinerated.

06:35

The Indian government knows it has a problem. But it also knows that the West will suffer from the consequences of the glacial melt-down. At the State Institute for Energy and Resources, Professor Hasnain speaks of the globabl importance of the ‚Third Pole’.

06:51

O-T Professor Hasnain

„ It is the biggest frozen surface after the North and South Poles. The greatest difference between these and the ‚Third Pole’, is that two and a half billion people are dependant on it for their livelihoods. If such a huge number of people are left without water and natural resources, the whole global community will be affected by it.“

07:19

Time is running out for the Glacier. Dr. Dobhal and his team are studding the holes in the ice with meter-long Bamboo poles. Next year, the ice will have retreated further. The poles will be able to tell them how much the glacier has lost in mass.

Leave back-ground noise „back-slapping"

07:40

The glacier is about 50 metres thick, the loss for 2009 has been considerable once again. 

O-T Dobhal „Almost two metres...in one year" 

07:53

In twenty years this glacier will be gone.    

07:57

The Himalayan glaciers are far from Europe, but the effects of their dissappearance will be felt here. When the means of existence of two and a half billion people are threatened, economic and political international relations will be easily thrown off kilter.

Inserts:

D.P Dobhal

Geologist, Institute of Himalayan Geology

Gobind Singh

Frank Paul

Glaciologist, Zürich University

Andreas Fischlin

Systems Ecologist , ETH Zürich

Syed Hasnain

Energy and Resources Institute, Delhi

Report:

Jörg Denzer

Camera/Editing

Jörg Denzer

Text ends: 08:17

Footage ends: 08:20