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We present the latest development in multidisciplinary Third Pole research and associated recommendations regarding the unprecedented warming in the Third Pole’s past 2,000 years.
The Third Pole (TP) is the high-elevation area in Asia centered on the Tibetan Plateau and is home to around 1,000,000 km2 of glaciers, containing the largest volumes of ice outside the polar regions. The TP glaciers experience abrupt retreat under climate warming with westerly monsoon interaction (Yao et al. 2012b). More than 10 major rivers, including the Yangtze River, the Yellow River, and the Ganges River, originate from the TP, making it the “Water Tower of Asia.” However, the Water Tower of Asia is now in danger due to rapid warming (Immerzeel et al. 2012). Although the TP ecosystems are greening as a whole under climate warming, there is a clear north-south contrast (M. G. Shen et al. 2015b).
Climate over the TP is complex. It is primarily influenced by the interaction between the Asian monsoon and midlatitude westerlies and is highly sensitive to climate change, which can exert major control on the atmospheric circulation at the local and continental scales. Meteorological records reveal that the warming rate on the TP is twice of that observed globally over the past five decades (Chen et al. 2015). Reconstructions of temperature changes on the TP in the past 2,000 years have provided a historical context for the recent warming and for various mechanism studies of climate change, as well as for their linkages with human activity to be tested and thereby enable more accurate projections of future scenarios.
This article presents a mini review of the state of TP multidisciplinary research and associated recommendations motivated from the “International Workshop on Land Surface Multi-Spheres Processes of Tibetan Plateau and their Environmental and Climate Effects Assessment” held in Xining, China, in August 2016. This TP workshop was organized by the Third Pole Environment (TPE), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ITPCAS), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with more than 230 participants from China, the United States, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, India, and six other countries. The American Geophysical Union (AGU), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the Chinese Academy...