Kapnick study tries to resolve Karakoram glacier anomaly
Researchers from Princeton University and other institutions may have hit upon an answer to a climate-change puzzle that has eluded scientists for years, and that could help understand the future availability of water for hundreds of millions of people.
In a phenomenon known as the "Karakoram anomaly," glaciers in the Karakoram mountains, a range within the Himalayas, have remained stable and even increased in mass while many glaciers nearby — and worldwide — have receded during the past 150 years, particularly in recent decades. Himalayan glaciers provide freshwater to a densely populated area that includes China, Pakistan and India, and are the source of the Ganges and Indus rivers, two of the world's major waterways.
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First author Sarah Kapnick, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton's Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, said that a shortage of reliable observational data and the use of low-resolution computer models had obscured the subtleties of the Karakoram seasonal cycle and prevented scientists from unraveling the causes of the anomaly.
For models, the complication is that the Karakoram features dramatic shifts in elevation over a small area, Kapnick said. The range boasts four mountains that are more than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) high — including K2, the world's second highest peak — and numerous summits that exceed 7,000 meters, all of which are packed into a length of about 500 kilometers (300 miles).
Kapnick and her co-authors overcame this obstacle with a high-resolution computer model that broke the Karakoram into 50-kilometer pieces, meaning that those sharp fluctuations in altitude were better represented.
In their study, the researchers compared their model with climate models from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which averages a resolution of 210-kilometer squares, Kapnick said. At that scale, the Karakoram is reduced to an average height that is too low and results in temperatures that are too warm to sustain sufficient levels of snowfall throughout the year, and too sensitive to future temperature increases.
Thus, by the IPCC's models, it would appear that the Karakoram's glaciers are imperiled by climate change due to reduced snowfall, Kapnick said. This region has been a great source of controversy ever since the IPCC's last major report, in 2007, when the panel misreported that Himalayan glaciers would likely succumb to climate change by 2035. More recent papers using current IPCC models have similarly reported snowfall losses in this region because the models do not accurately portray the topography of the Karakoram, Kapnick said.
"The higher resolution allowed us to explore what happens at these higher elevations in a way that hasn't been able to be done," Kapnick said. "Something that climate scientists always have to keep in mind is that models are useful for certain types of questions and not necessarily for other types of questions. While the IPCC models can be particularly useful for other parts of the world, you need a higher resolution for this area."