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China’s Glacier Area Shrinks by 26% Over Six Decades 

Meltwater from the Laohugou No. 12 glacier, flows though the Qilian mountains, Subei Mongol Autonomous County in Gansu province, China, September 27, 2020. (Reuters)
Meltwater from the Laohugou No. 12 glacier, flows though the Qilian mountains, Subei Mongol Autonomous County in Gansu province, China, September 27, 2020. (Reuters)
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China’s Glacier Area Shrinks by 26% Over Six Decades 

Meltwater from the Laohugou No. 12 glacier, flows though the Qilian mountains, Subei Mongol Autonomous County in Gansu province, China, September 27, 2020. (Reuters)
Meltwater from the Laohugou No. 12 glacier, flows though the Qilian mountains, Subei Mongol Autonomous County in Gansu province, China, September 27, 2020. (Reuters)

China's glacier area has shrunk by 26% since 1960 due to rapid global warming, with 7,000 small glaciers disappearing completely and glacial retreat intensifying in recent years, official data released in March showed.

Glaciers around the globe are disappearing faster than ever, with the largest glacial mass loss on record taking place in the last three years, according to a UNESCO report.

As the important water towers continue to shrink, less availability of freshwater is expected to contribute to greater competition for water resources, environmental groups have warned. Glacier retreat also poses new disaster risks.

China's glaciers are located mainly in the west and north of the country, in the regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai.

Data published on March 21 on the website of the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, showed that China's total glacier area was around 46,000 square kilometers, with around 69,000 glaciers in 2020.

This compares to around 59,000 square kilometers and around 46,000 glaciers in China between 1960 and 1980, the study showed.

To save its melting glaciers, China has used technology including snow blankets and artificial snow systems, to delay the melting process.

The Tibetan plateau is known as the world's Third Pole for the amount of ice long locked in the high-altitude wilderness.

The dramatic ice loss, from the Arctic to the Alps, from South America to the Tibetan Plateau, is expected to accelerate as climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, pushes global temperatures higher.

This would likely exacerbate economic, environmental and social problems across the world as sea levels rise and these key water sources dwindle, the UNESCO report said.

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Scientists Release Plans for an Even Bigger Atom Smasher to Address the Mysteries of Physics

Mike Lamont, director for accelerators and technology, center left, and Fabiola Gianotti, center right, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Large Magnet Facility during a visit to CERN facilities in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, March 21, 2025. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
Mike Lamont, director for accelerators and technology, center left, and Fabiola Gianotti, center right, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Large Magnet Facility during a visit to CERN facilities in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, March 21, 2025. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
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Scientists Release Plans for an Even Bigger Atom Smasher to Address the Mysteries of Physics

Mike Lamont, director for accelerators and technology, center left, and Fabiola Gianotti, center right, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Large Magnet Facility during a visit to CERN facilities in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, March 21, 2025. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
Mike Lamont, director for accelerators and technology, center left, and Fabiola Gianotti, center right, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Large Magnet Facility during a visit to CERN facilities in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, March 21, 2025. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

Top minds at the world's largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics.

The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva — published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study “known physics” in greater detail, then enter a second phase — planned for 2070 — that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would “open the door to the unknown,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, The AP news reported.

“History of physics tells that when there is more data, the human ingenuity is able to extract more information than originally expected,” Chiarelli, who was not involved in the plans, said in an e-mail.

For roughly a decade, top minds at CERN have been making plans for a successor to the Large Hadron Collider, a network of magnets that accelerate particles through a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel and slam them together at velocities approaching the speed of light.

“Ultimately what we would like to do is a collider which will come up with 10 times more energy than what we have today,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a CERN spokesman. “When you have more energy, then you can create particles that are heavier.”

The blueprint lays out the proposed path, environmental impact, scientific ambitions and project cost. Independent experts will take a look before CERN's two dozen member countries decide in 2028 whether to go forward, starting in the mid-2040s at a cost of some 14 billion Swiss francs (about $16 billion).

CERN officials tout the promise of scientific discoveries that could drive innovation in fields like cryogenics, superconducting magnets and vacuum technologies that could benefit humankind.

Outside experts point to the promise of learning more about the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that has been controversially dubbed “the God particle,” which helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.

Work at the particle collider confirmed in 2013 the existence of the Higgs boson — the central piece in a puzzle known as the standard model that helps explains some fundamental forces in the universe.

“This set of reports represents an important milestone in the process, but a full sense of the likelihood of it being brought to fruition will only be known through careful studies by scientists, engineers and others, including politicians who must make difficult decisions at time when uncertainty rules the day,” Dave Toback, a professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University, said in an e-mail.

The new collider “provides an exciting opportunity for the particle physics community, and indeed all of physics, on the world stage,” said Toback, who was not affiliated with the plans, and who worked for years at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in the United States that was shut down in 2011.

CERN scientists, engineers and partners behind the plans considered at least 100 scenarios for the new collider before coming up with the proposed 91-kilometer circumference at an average depth of 200 meters (656 feet). The tunnel would be about 5 meters (16 feet) in diameter, CERN said.