A sky-high view of the Third Pole: an interview with Tandong Yao and Weiming Fan

<正>The Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain regions covers 5 million square kilometres—nearly half the China’s landmass—with an average elevation of over 4000 metres.It’s oten regarded as the hird Pole because it has the largest stock of ice outside the Arctic and the Antarctic.Tibetan Plateau research is one of China’s Strategic Pioneering Programmes that was launched in 2012 with a budget of 300million yuan(US$47 million)over 5 years and is led by Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS)’Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research