New Delhi: The Himalayas has lost glaciers as hugely as the size of around 570 million elephants put together, says a study.
The researchers for the first time have documented heavy loss of glaciers happening below the surface where the depletion remained invisible.
The glacier loss continued ‘underestimated’ after satellites failed to note changes happening ‘underwater’.
The previous studies had not considered the loss because the utilized satellite data can only measure the surface of the lake water, not the ice underwater replaced by water.
Researchers including those from UK's University of St Andrews the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Graz University of Technology in Austria, and Carnegie Mellon University put the total glacier loss in Himalayas to 6.5 per cent.
"Our estimates reduce uncertainties in total glacier mass loss, provide important data for glacio-hydrological models, and therefore also support the water resources management in this sensitive mountain region," researchers reportedly said.
The lead author Guoqing Zhang from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, said that the findings ‘have important implications for understanding the impact of regional water resources and glacial lake outburst floods’.
The study found that proglacial lakes in the region increased by 47 percent between 2000 and 2020 in number, 33 percent in area and 42 percent in volume.
This meant there is an estimated glacier loss of around 2.7 Gt equivalent to 570 million elephants. This is over 1000 times the total number of elephants living in the world.