A 12-volume Chinese Glacier Inventory has recently been finished by a group of Chinese glaciologists headed by Prof. Shi Yafeng from the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute under CAS. The work was officially reviewed and accepted on Sept. 13 by a panel of experts organized by Gansu Provincial Bureau of Science and Technology and CAS Lanzhou Branch.
The 2699-page catalogue, containing more than 40 parameters (such as geographic location, area, orientation, elevation, and classification of morphological type) about the glaciers throughout the country, is the result of a series of field trekking surveys lasting for 24 years. Started in 1978 when the project won the approval from the central government, more than 50 scientists had participated in the research and more than a dozen field expeditions with the help of more than 2,000 aerial maps, 342,000 aero-photographic pictures, and 200 satellite-relayed images.
The inventory reveals, for the first time in the history of similar studies, some fundamental figures in this regard, including the precise numbers of existing glaciers in China. As indicated by the final statistics of the corpus, there are a total of 46,298 glaciers throughout the country, with 59,406 square kilometers in total area, distributed in Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan and Tibet. They preserve 5,590 cubic kilometers in ice storage, equivalent to 50,310 trillion cubic meters in water resources. Scientists estimate their melting water runoffs of the glaciers would be 61.6 billion cubic meters.
The scientists have discovered that there are 33 glaciers each with an area greater than 100 square kilometers, including the largest valley glacier Insukati covering 392.4 square kilometers, the largest ice field Puruogangri totaling 423 square kilometers in area and the largest ice cap Chongce with an area of 163 sqaure-kilometer in Chinese territory. In addition, the corpus records a total of 34,700 small glaciers with less than one square kilometer in area. They are vulnerable and sensitive to climatic changes and act as natural "barometers" for monitoring the ups and downs in water resources and weather forecasting in various localities.
The inventory also documents the changes of the glaciers in various stages. An analysis made by the researchers shows, for instance, that the total area of China's glaciers has shrunken by 3248 square kilometers over the past four decades, about 5.5% of the total acreage of China's glaciers in the 1960s.
The project is regarded a major achievements in basic research concerning resources and the environment in China, which makes up about 47.6% and 14.5% of the total area of the mid- and low-latitudinal mountain glaciers in Asia and world, respectively. The compilation of the inventory is of great significance for understanding glacier resources both in China and in the world.
