* Astronomy

A three-year study shows that glaciers in the Yangtze source area, central to the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, have receded 196 square kilometres over the past 40 years.
Glaciers at the headwaters of the Yangtze, China's longest river, now cover 1,051 square km compared to 1,247 square km in 1971, a loss of nearly a billion cubic metres of water. The tongue of the Yuzhu glacier, the highest in the Kunlun Mountains, fell by 1,500 metres over the same period, showed the study, to be used by the China Geological Survey Institute.

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New race to explore the Himalayas
The Hindu-Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region in South Asia has remained a nagging gap in the global climate change knowledge bank.
In the absence of field studies and adequate data, the impact of global warming in the area stretching from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the east is largely unknown.
In effect, there has been virtually no climate change adaptation plan for the zone, which is ecologically hypersensitive, yet a vital natural service provider.

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A three-year field study on the Tibetan plateau has shown that plant species differ in their ability to emit or consume methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This could shed fresh light on the role of plants in global methane budgets.
The saga began in early 2006 when Frank Keppler, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues, revealed that plants thought to be helping combat climate change by taking in carbon-dioxide may collectively emit millions of tonnes of methane.

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New fossil evidence from the rock desert and cold, treeless steppes of Tibet's desolate Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau that now comprise Earth's highest land mass suggests a literally groundbreaking possibility:
Major tectonic changes on the Tibetan Plateau may have caused it to attain its towering present-day elevations -- rendering it inhospitable to the plants and animals that once thrived there -- as recently as 2-3 million years ago, not millions of years earlier than that, as geologists have generally believed. The new evidence calls into question the validity of methods commonly used by scientists to reconstruct the past elevations of the region.

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