BEIJING: The worlds highest ice fields are melting so quickly that they are on course to disappear within 100 years, driving up sea levels, increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts, Chinese scientists have warned.

After the most detailed study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to account for 15% of the planet's ice, researchers from the Academy of Science said that urgent measures were needed to prepare for the impact of climate change at high altitude.

Their study, the Glacier Inventory, was approved for publication last week after a quarter of a century of exploration in China and Tibet. It will heighten alarm at global warming.

In the past 24 years, the scientists have measured a 5.5% shrinkage by volume in China's 46,298 glaciers, a loss equivalent to more than 3,000 sq km of ice; there has been a noticeable acceleration in recent years.

Among the most marked changes has been the 500-metre retreat of the glacier at the source of the Yangtze on the Tibet-Qinghai plateau.

The huge volumes of water from the glacier's melted ice, estimated at 587bn cubic metres since the 1950s, are thought to have been a factor in flooding that has devastated many downstream areas in recent years.

Shrinkages were observed at almost every ice-field in the Karakorum range, including the Purugangri glaciers, which are said to be the world's third largest body of ice after the Arctic and Antarctica. According to Yao Tandong, who led the 50 scientists in the project, the decline of the Himalayan glaciers would be a disaster for the ecosystem of China and neighbouring states.

If the climate continued to change at the current pace, he predicted that two-thirds of China's glaciers would disappear by the end of the 2050s, and almost all would have melted by 2100.

He predicted the end of the glaciers would deprive the mountain ecology of its main life source and hasten the desertification that threatens western China, particularly in Gansu and Xinjiang provinces.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.