(TibetanReview.net, Oct26’24) –The environmental harmfulness of human activities could be gauged from the fact that its effect has reached the remotest corners of the world, namely the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, for instance. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, Earth & Environment (nature.com, Oct 1).
The Tibetan Plateau’s glaciers are among the world’s most remote and untouched places. Pollution resulting from human activities is found to have reached even these ice fields which provide water for millions of people and play a vital environmental role.
The pollution, in the form of lead in the glaciers, was tracked by geoscientists who research was funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
Widely referred to as the “Roof of the World,” the Tibetan Plateau is the highest and largest plateau on Earth. In a study of the Guliya Ice Cap located there, Franco Marcantonio of Texas A&M University and his colleagues have discovered that significant lead pollution of the ice cap had begun in 1974, with the highest levels occurring between 2000 and 2007.
The team has measured lead isotopes (which refer to different species of atoms of the same chemical element) in samples dating to 36,000 years ago. The glacial ice serves as a historical record, giving scientists a way of comparing levels of modern lead contamination to those of pre-industrial times.
“Even though Pb [lead] has been used by ancient civilizations for millennia, it was not until the Industrial Revolution and later, when leaded gasoline was introduced … in the 1920s, that the emission of Pb from human activities skyrocketed,” the scientists have stated in their paper.
“By the 1980s, emissions surpassed their natural and pre-industrial contribution by about two orders of magnitude.”
The Tibetan Plateau “is considered to be a pristine place due to the very low industrial activity in the region,” the researchers have written.
Nonetheless, lead found its way there, and its history of human use was captured in the Guliya Ice Cap, located in the western Kunlun Mountains in Rutog County of Ngari prefecture, western Tibet.
“This study advances our understanding of the breadth and timing of environmental impacts from human activities,” Margaret Fraiser, a program director in the NSF Division of Earth Sciences, has said.