Lonnie Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote, mist-shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. Even as he pitched his tent on top of Puncak Jaya, the ice was melting beneath him. The 3-mile- (4,884-meter-) high glacier was pounded by rain every afternoon during the team's 13-day trip, something the American scientist has never encountered in three decades of drilling ice cores. He lay awake at night listening to the water gushing beneath him. By the time they were ready to head home, ice around their sheltered campsite had melted a staggering 12 inches (30 centimeters). “These glaciers are dying,” said Thompson, one of the world's most accomplished glaciologists. “Before I was thinking they had a few decades, but now I'd say we're looking at years.” Thompson has led 57 such expeditions in 16 countries around the planet, from China to Peru. But for him, the Papuan glaciers, because they lie along the fringe of the world's warmest ocean and could provide clues about regional weather patterns, were an unexplored “missing link.” It is this region that generates El Nino disturbances and influences climate from India's monsoons to the Amazon's droughts. As such, it is one of the only “archives” about the story of the equatorial phenomenon, said Michael Prentice of the Indiana Geological Survey, who has long been interested in the area. It also could point to what lies ahead for billions of people in Asia. The ice that covered much of Papua thousands of years ago is today just 1 square mile (2 square kilometers) wide and 32 yards (meters) deep. Deep crevasses crisscross the dirty ice. Glaciers worldwide are in retreat, with major losses already seen across much of Alaska, the Alps, the Andes and numerous other ranges. What makes Puncak Jaya different, aside from its location in the Pacific, is just how little is known about it. The mountain has lost about 80 percent of its ice since 1936 - two-thirds of that since the last scientific expedition in the early 1970s. Thompson says he thinks temperatures are rising twice as fast in high altitudes as at the earth's surfac.e.
