Nature News: The Tibetan plateau gets a lot less attention than the Arctic or Antarctic, but after them it is Earth's largest store of ice. And the store is melting fast. In the past half-century, 82% of the plateau's glaciers have retreated. In the past decade, 10% of its permafrost has degraded. As the changes continue, or even accelerate, their effects will resonate far beyond the isolated plateau, changing the water supply for billions of people and altering the atmospheric circulation over half the planet.

The proximate cause of the changes now being felt on the plateau is a rise in temperature of up to 0.3 °C a decade that has been going on for fifty years — approximately three times the global warming rate. The questions are how much more change to expect in the future, and how severe the effects will be on the planet's climate as a whole.