As a symbol of global warming this is hard to beat. Mount
Everest is shrinking, as mentioned here. And it bodes no good
for the water supplies of vast areas of India and China.
Everest's snow may be quite endangered; Lester Brown, President
of the Earth Policy Institute points out, in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that many of the
receding Himalayan glaciers could melt entirely by 2035. The
base camp has dropped from its normal 17,454 ft. to 17,322 ft.
in 2007 alone because of ice melting. This story in gristmill
has a detailed explanation of the problems this will cause. Even
as India and China face these future disruptions in river flows,
overpumping is depleting the underground water resources that
both countries also use for irrigation. For example, water
tables are falling everywhere under the North China Plain, the
country’s principal grain-producing region. When an aquifer is
depleted, the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate
of recharge. In India, water tables are fallin