Indonesia glaciers may vanish by 2026 due to global warming: expert
Indonesia's only glaciers could disappear by next year due to global warming, an expert has said, in a phenomenon that may affect the island's flora and fauna including indigenous species, Kyodo reports.
The glaciers -- on the 4,862-meter-high peak Puncak Jaya located in the Jayawijaya Mountains in the Indonesian part of the island that the country shares with Papua New Guinea -- are called "eternal snow" by locals. They are the last remaining ones in tropical western Pacific, said Donaldi Sukma Permana from Indonesia's Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysical Agency.
Donaldi, who leads a team from the meteorological agency surveying the glacier, said in November that the glacier in the country's Central Papua Province was only about 4 meters thick, down from 6 meters in December in 2023.
The ice's thickness was 32 meters in 2010 when the meteorological agency first installed measuring instruments at the top of Puncak Jaya, according to Donaldi.
"The decline has been very significant, reaching a level at which it is difficult to prevent the glaciers from disappearing," Donaldi said in an interview, adding the glaciers may be gone by 2026 or 2027.
The strong El Nino of 2015 and 2016 raised the temperature of the sea surface, causing the glacier to shrink to 5.6 meters in thickness, in one of the sharpest drops recorded by the agency, according to the team.
The ice coverage also declined from 0.23 square kilometers in 2022 to between 0.11 and 0.16, he said.
The impact of the disappearing glaciers to the ecosystem in the Indonesian part of the New Guinea island has been researched by experts from University of Indonesia and Cendrawasih University in the country, Donaldi said.
"The experts said that because of the rising temperature, some species of animals have been gradually migrating," he said.
The island is home to some unique species of bird-of-paradise.
What most concerns Donaldi, who specializes in atmospheric, oceanic and cryospheric sciences, about the shrinking glacier is the sea level rise caused by its melting ice, he said.
In Indonesia, glaciers previously existed on five peaks in Papua, including the 4,884-meter Cartensz Pyramid, which is close to Puncak Jaya. All of the glaciers on the Indonesian peaks, except on Puncak Jaya, disappeared between 1990s and 2000s, according to the researcher.
In other parts of the globe, tropical glaciers exist in the Eastern Rift mountains in Africa, including Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Andes mountain range in South America.
Venezuela's Humboldt Glacier in the Andes was deemed to have disappeared by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States in May of last year.
In 2015, scientists estimated that the glacier spanned about 0.1 square km but it had shrunk to cover one-tenth of that by 2024, according to NASA, with the space agency saying scientists generally agree that an ice field of this size is stagnant and deemed not to be a glacier anymore.
