El Nino could doom Indonesia’s rare tropical glaciers by 2026

Two of the world's few tropical glaciers in Indonesia are melting, their ice under threat to vanish by 2026 or sooner, as an El Nino weather pattern lengthens the dry season in the southeast Asian nation, its geophysics agency said on Wednesday. Indonesia, home to a third of the world's rainforest after Brazil and Congo, expects the dry season could run until October as El Nino increases the risk of forest fires and threatens supplies of clean water. While the agency has warned that the Pacific weather phenomenon could make this year's dry season the most severe since 2019, one of its climate researchers said it could also imperil Indonesia's 12,000-year-old tropical glaciers.