Findings released by a team of Sino-US researchers earlier this week warned of increased downstream flooding and a potential 'ecological disaster' when the glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau eventually disappear by 2100.

Glaciers on the plateau have been shrinking at an average pace of 7 per cent annually in the past 40 years, a worrying increase from the annual 5 per cent shrinkage seen between 1850 and 1960, state media reports said.

The damage to glaciers in south-eastern Tibet and the regions at low sea levels appeared to have been the most severe, according to the group of 20 scientists who conducted their month-long study in the Himalayas and southern Tibet's Gangdise mountains.

Increased global warming after the early 1990s - a period that corresponds with China's own breakneck pace of economic growth and urbanisation - appeared to have accelerated the melting of the glaciers.

'The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe,' China's top glaciologist, Professor Yao Tandong, was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying.

In an e-mail reply to queries from The Straits Times, Prof Yao said that the melting of the glaciers will affect mainly north-western China and the Tibetan plateau.

There will be increased flooding in inland rivers such as the Tarim River, in the remote Xinjiang province, while some of the oases in Xinjiang and Gangsu will disappear.

Cities further downstream will also have a less stable supply of water for hydroelectric power and crop irrigation.

Quoting academics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinhua said the melting of the glaciers added about 6 per cent more runoff to the rivers in the region - an amount of water equivalent to the runoff flow of China's second largest river, the Yellow River.

But when asked if there was a connection between the melting of the glaciers and the recent years of severe flooding seen in central and southern China, Prof Yao said there was no evidence to suggest a 'direct' link.

The shrinking of the glaciers in remote western China adds to the growing body of evidence - together with the melting of the polar ice-caps and the glaciers on Mt Kilimanjaro, Africa, and the Andes mountains of Peru - that some scientists are using to warn of impending climate changes as ocean levels rise.

Though global warming is more of a worldwide phenomenon driven by human activity everywhere, scientists like Professor Lonnie Thompson are concerned about the way China is becoming an 'ever bigger driver in the global climate change'.

For instance, China is already the world's second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and is expected to overtake the United States in the first place between 2025 and 2030 - if no controls are put in place.

'We are already detecting the air pollution coming out of China in the ice cores we have recently collected from the Wrangell-St Elias mountain range in South-east Alaska,' Professor Thompson, a renowned glaciologist with the Ohio State University who was also part of the recent Sino-US expedition, wrote in an e-mail reply.

He added: 'In today's world, we are all connected through our common atmosphere and thus the impact of air pollution and carbon dioxide production in any country impacts on both the regional and global scales.'

His greatest hope is that China, which has yet to develop the kind of entrenched fossil fuel infrastructure seen in the West, will 'leapfrog' the developed world in pioneering the use of hybrid vehicles and alternative sources of energy such as hydrogen, wind or solar power.

The signs are that top Chinese leaders, especially Premier Wen Jiabao, are determined to steer the country towards a more sustainable growth model, away from the current high-wastage, high-polluting mode.

China's top environmental agency has also come up with a preliminary framework for implementing the concept of 'green GDP' in several pilot cities, which takes into account the impact of environmental degradation in planning, as concerns over the fragile ecology grow.

News of the rapidly melting glaciers in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has inspired colourful warnings in the media here of a 'new Ice Age', which was vividly portrayed in the recent Hollywood special-effects blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow.

'While the movie is, in my opinion, over the top ...it does make an important point that is well documented in the ice core records from the Tibetan Plateau as well as the polar ice caps,' said Prof Thompson, who has conducted research on ice fields in five continents.

'The question, of course, is whether anyone is listening,' he pointed out.