The Puncak Jaya mountains in Indonesia's Papua region Photo: AFP
This year's El Niño phenomenon could hasten the disappearance in West Papua of one of the world's last remaining tropical glaciers, causing it to be extinct by as soon as 2026, Indonesia's meteorological agency has warned.
The glacier on the peak of Puncak Jaya was already melting rapidly due to global warming, Benar News quotes the agency's chief as saying.
By December 2022, it had shrunk to a thickness of 6 metres, from 8m a year before and 22m in 2016.
"The disappearance of the ice cap on Puncak Jaya will have a huge impact on various aspects of life in the region," Dwikorita Karnawati, director of the National Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, said.
"The ecosystem around the permanent ice cap is vulnerable and threatened. Climate change also affects the lives of local indigenous people who have long depended on the environmental balance and natural resources in the region," she said.
Climate change, which causes global warming, has brought about a rapid loss of the glacier's ice, she said.
And the El Niño phenomenon, which occurs periodically, tends to bring warmer and drier conditions to Indonesia, reducing rainfall and increasing evaporation. In turn, this further shrinks the ice cap.
"The glacier might vanish before 2026, or even faster, and El Niño could accelerate the melting process," Donaldi Sukma Permana, a climatologist, told Reuters.
The meteorological agency said the strongest El Niño on record, in 2015 and 2016, accelerated the glacier's decline by up to 5m a year.
At 4884m high, Puncak Jaya, also known as Carstensz Pyramid, is the tallest mountain in Indonesia, and part of a range that stretches across Papua.
The glacier was first documented by European explorers in the early 20th century and has since attracted many scientists, researchers and nature lovers who marvelled at its existence in a tropical country.
In 2010, a team of scientists from Ohio State University and the Indonesian agency drilled ice cores from the glacier and found evidence of its long history, estimating it had existed for at least 5000 years.
They also found proof of its sensitivity to climate change.
Global warming not only increased the temperature, it also changed the altitude at which rain turned to snow, as an article on the university's website explained. So, rain was now falling at altitudes where it used to snow and replenish the ice on the glacier.
"If you want to kill a glacier, just put water on it," said Lonnie Thompson, Ohio State University professor in 2019.
"The water basically becomes like a hot water drill. It goes right through the ice to the bedrock," said Thompson, who was a senior author of a study on the glacier published in the National Academy of Sciences.
The 2010 Ohio State team also found traces of pollutants such as lead and sulfur in the ice cores, indicating human influence on the environment.
The glacier is located near a large copper and gold mine operated by PT Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of an American company that has been accused of causing environmental damage and human rights violations in Papua.
Donaldi, with the Indonesian meteorological agency, said the ice on the Puncak Jaya glacier had thinned by about 2.5m per year between 2016 and 2022.
He said that the ice cover was about 0.23 square kilometres last year and was continuing to melt.
"Another real impact of the melting ice on the mountain is its contribution to the global sea level rise," which Donaldi said could affect millions of people in low-lying coastal areas.
The melting ice would change the flora and fauna on the mountain, said Rizaldy Boer, a climate risk management expert at the Bogor Agricultural University.
"Some species could go extinct. The latest one, since the ice melting has worsened in the last 10 years, has been a type of frog that has disappeared there," he told Benar News.
- Benar News/Reuters
