Global warming accelerates glacier loss in Turkiye's Cilo

KEMAL Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkiye’s Kurdish majority southeast: “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky.

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A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks - a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming.

“You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.

The glaciers of Mount Cilo, which rises to 4 135m in the province of Hakkari on the Iraqi border, are the second largest in the country behind those of Mount Ararat (5 137m) - 250km further north.

As global temperatures rise amid human-caused climate change, new sections of the mountains that were once capped in ice are melting fast year after year.