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''' CLIMATE FUELS CLAMOUR '''
THE BACKSTORY : YEAR AFTER YEAR - as autumn in Alaska is ending, Ryota Kajita goes looking for winter's first ice.
A Japanese-born photographer living in Fairbanks, Kajita believes that ''everything - even if it appears to be insignificant - connects to larger aspects of our Earth.''
An example, he says is the ice, after it has frozen over ponds and lakes before it's been obscured by snow.
Kajita has been shooting photos through the ice since 2010 for his project, 'Ice Formation'. He's captivated by the geometric pattern he sees : fizzy fields of bubbles under the frozen surface, and snow and ice crystals dusted across it.
Many photos are compositions of trapped, frozen bubbles of methane and carbon dioxide.
Though Kajita loves to photograph the formation, their existence worries him. As Earth's northern region warm, the melting permafrost accelerates. That accelerates more methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.
Kajita hopes people who see the photos will ''feel connected to nature'' - and that connection will help them ''face bigger issues, like global climate change.''
CLIMATE CHANGE FUELS SHARP increase in glacier lakes :
NUMBER OF LAKES FORMED FROM MELTING GLACIERS has jumped by 50% in 30 years, according to the latest research and study study based on satellite data.
''We have known that not all meltwater is making it into oceans immediately,'' lead author Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist and associate professor at the University of Calgary, said in a statement.
''But until now there were no data to estimate how much was being stored in lakes or groundwater.''
The findings, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, will help scientists and governments identify potential hazards to communities downstream of these often unstable lakes, he said.
They will also improve the accuracy of sea level rise estimates through better understanding of how -and how quickly - water shed by glaciers makes it to the sea.
''In the past 100 years, 35 percent of global sea-level rises came from glacier melting,'' Anders Levermann, climate professor at Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact, told AFP.
The other main sources of sea level rise are ice sheets and the expansion of ocean water as it warms.
Earth's average surface temperature has risen one degree Celsius since pre-industrial times, but high mountain regions around the world have warmed at twice that pace, accelerating glacier melt.
Unlike normal lakes, glaciers lakes are unstable because they are often dammed by ice or sediment composed of loose rock and debris.
When accumulating water bursts through these accidental barriers, massive flooding can occur downstream.
Known as glacial lake outbursts, this kind of flooding has been responsible for thousands of deaths in the past last century, as well as the destruction of villages, infrastructure and livestock, according to the study, published in Nature Climate Change.
The most recent recorded incident was a glacial lake outburst that washed through the Hunza Valley in Pakistan in May.
In January, the UN Development Programme estimated that more than 1.000 glacial lakes have formed in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, with 33 posing an imminent threat that could impact as many as seven million people. [AFP]
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