单选题 The world"s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shah 1 the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice 2 the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who 3 that around 50bn tons of meltwater 4 each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world"s icecaps and glaciers and was made 5 by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps— Greenland and Antarctica—is much 6 than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia 7 most of the discrepancy.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said, "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia which is not 8 different from zero. "
The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused 9 in 2009 when a report from the UN"s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. 10 , the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia"s highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world 11 a serious concern.
"Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world"s ice as they were before. "
His team"s study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tons of meltwater overall are added to the world"s oceans each year. This is 12 sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, 13 the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.
The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges—sometimes dubbed the "third pole" —are 14 melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period, enough ice was added to the peaks to 15 .