ACCELERATED WARMING IN HIGH MOUNTAIN REGIONS HAS GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS
An international research team with members from 10 different countries came together as part of the Mountain Research Initiative to tackle why high mountain regions may be more susceptible to warming, and how that fact could have global implications.
“There is growing evidence that high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations and such warming can accelerate many other environmental changes such as glacial melt and vegetation change, but scientists urgently need more and better data to confirm this,” said Nick Pepin, the lead author of the Mountain Research Initiative Working Group’s report, in a recent issue of Nature Climate Change.
With high mountains serving as a major water source for people living at lower elevations, scientists are calling for high elevation research to be bolstered in order to combat the effects of increased warming rates at higher altitudes. Mountains also serve as a habitat for many rare and endangered species, and with many different ecosystems operating in such close proximity, the ecological sensitivity of mountains to climate change increases dramatically.
With records of weather patterns at high altitudes being extremely sparse, inferences about how serious this accelerated warming is can be difficult to calculate.
“We are calling for special efforts to be made to extend scientific observations upwards to the highest summits to capture what is happening across the world’s mountains,” said Raymond Bradley, director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We also need a strong effort to find, collate, and evaluate observational data that already exists wherever it is in the world. This requires international collaboration.”
—Steven Grossman
