Some New Zealand glaciers growing despite global warming

Jan 30, 2007, 21:10 GMT

Wellington - While ice fields around the world are melting as a result of global warming, New Zealand's two most famous glaciers in the Southern Alps are growing, it was reported on Wednesday.

According to alpine guides, the 14 kilometre-long Fox Glacier and the nearby Franz Josef Glacier in the Westland National Park advanced hundreds of metres down their valleys last year and may soon be close to positions they were at 40 years ago, The Press newspaper of Christchurch reported.

It quoted the Swiss-based World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) as saying that many glaciers elsewhere on the planet are shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s.

The organisation, which monitors 30 mountain glaciers, reported this week that its latest survey of conditions in 2005 showed the glaciers had on average become 60-70 centimetres thinner due to climate change.

WGMS director Wilfried Haeberli said that many mountain glaciers were only tens of metres thick and would disappear in decades if the trend continued.

'We can say there were times during the warmer periods of the last 10,000 years when glaciers have been comparable to what they are now,' he told the BBC.

'But it is not the past that worries us, it is the future. With the scenarios predicted, we will enter conditions which we have not seen in the past 10,000 years, and perhaps conditions which mankind has never experienced.'

Tom Arnold, a guides manager at the Franz Josef Glacier which descends about 10 kilometres from the main divide of the Southern Alps, told The Press it and the Fox Glacier had advanced hundreds of metres in the last year, with daily movements of 30-80 cm.

He said really big snowfalls at the top of the glaciers two to three years ago had helped, along with many overcast days during the current summer which stopped the ice from melting.

But it is not the same story everywhere in New Zealand.

Another Alpine expert, Trevor Chinn, told the paper that some other glaciers, including the Tasman, Mueller, Hooker, Ramsay, Balfour and La Perouse, were retreating as growing glacial lakes wore away the face of the ice-mass.