This article is prompted by the Richard Bernstein article of today in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. The two versions differ in their titles - the NYT talks of “Warming in Austria.” The IHT title talks of a more general “Not-So-Glacial Retreat”.

Bernstein who visited The Kaiser Franz-Joseph Heights saw what happens to Austria’s largest glacier. The Pasterze glacier is shrinking four to eight meters (13 to 26 feet) annually. “The cable car built 40 years ago, to take tourists to the glacier now leaves them high and dry” - in effect people at the glacier look like ants from where the cable car drops them off.

Bernstein, who usually does not report on environmental causes, also mentions that the director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has said that the Himalayan glaciers shrink annually by an amount equivalent to all the water in the Yellow River.

Further, he mentions that geologists Andrea Hampel at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and Ralf Hetzel at the University of Munster, Germany, wrote in “Nature”, earlier this year, that the retreat of glaciers could cause an increase in the number of earthquakes. Also, other scientists have warned that lakes forming in the back of glaciers, because of melting ice, could burst through cracks in the glaciers and cause tsunami-like devastation to towns down below. On the other hand, in China’s Xinjiang Province, desert towns which depend on seasonal glacial melting for replenishing underground water supplies, will be left dry.

Bernstein interviewed by phone Hans-Erwin Minor, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), who told him about the demise of the permafrost - “and there will be instabilities in the mountains, debris flows, mud flows, erosion of loose material.”

We picked up these articles because www.SuatainabiliTank.info touched upon the melting of the ice cover of the Antarctica in our article - “UN Leads World’s Tsunami Relief Efforts” (January 14, 2005,) in an attempt to explain that it is possible that the decrease of the pressure on the land mass of the Antarctica has caused the shift of the tectonic plates, leading to the earthquake that caused the tsunami. The Bernstein article has elements that can support above assumption.

One can think of the Himalayas as a third global ice-cap, that actually sits on top of fault lines. The Bernstein article allows thus for a possible additional factor in the development of the tsunami — plates being pushed from two directions.

One can expect to see many more studies to come out regarding the glacial retreat in the Alps and this could help shed light on all these other subjects. Bernstein talks of attempts to cover the Austrian glacier with an isolation in order to prolong the life of the snow cover of the ice — perhaps this is an area that could be explored further.