The BBC reports:
Although the latest global update on climate change says the vast majority of glaciers worldwide have continued to shrink, scientists have admitted that the Himalayas remain an area where they still have very limited information.
Glaciologists involved in the cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first phase report, launched last week, said there was no good sample of Himalayan glaciers that could help them forecast their future behaviour.
“The Himalayas are one of the areas we really are data-poor,” said Prof David Vaughan from Cambridge University, UK, and one of the two lead coordinating authors of the ice chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
“We really need good samples of lots of glaciers and their measurements; we would like to have a larger number of benchmark glaciers,” he told BBC News.
They will grow with sun cycles 24 & 25!
Benchmarks are simply data points valid at a moment in time.
More important than benchmarks are histories for the glaciers. If you want to make credible predictions about their futures, you must have at hand their histories.