Melting Everest – being monitored by time-lapse camera

An American organization has installed five special time-lapse video cameras to observe the melting of ice on the top of the world, Mt. Everest. This is the fist time such camera is installed in the Everest region to monitor the melting of glaciers.

Everest region got a renewed attention when a key document of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a scientific body to look into climate change issues inaccurately predicted the the disappearance of all the glaciers in the Himalayas by 2035. IPCC recently admitted the data mistake in its report published in 2007.

Last week a technical team of Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) installed the four cameras to monitor the Khumbu Glacier and one to monitor Nara Glacier on the south side of Ama Dablam himal.

EIS is conducting the first wide-ranging glacier study by using ground-based, real-time photography. Time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video are used to document the rapid changes occurring on the earth’s glacial ice. Apart from the ones at the Everest region EIS has already installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains.

The camera will capture the images of the glaciers every 30 minutes for coming two years.