The annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting was held during Dec. 3-7, 2012 in San Francisco. Over 20,000 scientists from around the world gathered to exchange their research and explore the latest development in Earth Sciences. As part of the meeting, TPE sponsored sessions entitled “The Third Pole Environment (TPE) Under Global Changes”, which were convened by TPE co-chairs Prof. YAO Tandong of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lonnie G. Thompson of Ohio State University, Prof. Dr. Volker Mosbrugger from Germany and Prof. Yongwei Sheng of UCLA.

Under the theme of Global Changes, a wide-array of TPE-related research was presented at the oral session and 26 scientists shared their latest research findings with the attendees at the poster session. The sessions witnessed three notable presentations by invited speakers: Altitude and temperature dependence of change in the spring vegetation green-up date from 1982 to 2006 in the Qinghai -Xizang Plateau (by PIAO Shilong, Professor, Peking University), Permafrost-driven lake dynamics across the Tibetan Plateau in the past decades (by Yingkui Li, Associate Professor, University of Tennessee) and Uncertain future for the water resources of high mountain Asia (by Walter W. Immerzeel, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands).