Forgot your password?
Soot and Dust Responsible For Melting Himalayas
By KTM Metro Reporter in Kathmandu
The US space agency NASA has found that the soot coming out of incomplete burning of hundreds of thousands of wood-and dung-burning cooking stoves in South Asia has formed a dirty blanket called the Asian Brown Cloud over the Himalayas according to the Thaindian.com, December 16, 2009, news ‘Soot and dust damaging Himalayas: NASA’. This blanket has been responsible for reflecting less sunlight and causing accumulation of heat for melting snow from the Himalayas. The air currents passing from southern Asia to the Tibetan plateau take the soot and dust, and deposit them on the southern slope of Himalayas. This finding is submitted to the global summit on climate change held in Copenhagen from December 7 to 18.
In the study held on the soot and dust concentrations, and the air circulation patterns in South Asia between 2000 and 2007, the NASA scientists have found that the ice and snow rapidly melt at the western end of the Tibetan plateau between April and September each year coinciding with the period when soot and dust build up in the atmosphere of northern India and Nepal.
