Wellington - While ice fields around the world are melting
as a result of global warming, New Zealand's two most famous glaciers
in the Southern Alps are growing, it was reported on Wednesday.
According to alpine guides, the 14 kilometre-long Fox Glacier and
the nearby Franz Josef Glacier in the Westland National Park advanced
hundreds of metres down their valleys last year and may soon be close
to positions they were at 40 years ago, The Press newspaper of
Christchurch reported.
It quoted the Swiss-based World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS)
as saying that many glaciers elsewhere on the planet are shrinking
three times faster than they were in the 1980s.
The organisation, which monitors 30 mountain glaciers, reported
this week that its latest survey of conditions in 2005 showed the
glaciers had on average become 60-70 centimetres thinner due to
climate change.
WGMS director Wilfried Haeberli said that many mountain glaciers
were only tens of metres thick and would disappear in decades if the
trend continued.
'We can say there were times during the warmer periods of the last
10,000 years when glaciers have been comparable to what they are
now,' he told the BBC.
'But it is not the past that worries us, it is the future. With
the scenarios predicted, we will enter conditions which we have not
seen in the past 10,000 years, and perhaps conditions which mankind
has never experienced.'
Tom Arnold, a guides manager at the Franz Josef Glacier which
descends about 10 kilometres from the main divide of the Southern
Alps, told The Press it and the Fox Glacier had advanced hundreds of
metres in the last year, with daily movements of 30-80 cm.
He said really big snowfalls at the top of the glaciers two to
three years ago had helped, along with many overcast days during the
current summer which stopped the ice from melting.
But it is not the same story everywhere in New Zealand.
Another Alpine expert, Trevor Chinn, told the paper that some
other glaciers, including the Tasman, Mueller, Hooker, Ramsay,
Balfour and La Perouse, were retreating as growing glacial lakes wore
away the face of the ice-mass.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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