Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.
The world’s glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 231 billion tonnes annually from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 314 billion tonnes annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week’s journal Nature.
In the past few years, the melt has accelerated even more, hitting a record 548 billion tonnes lost in 2023, the last year analyzed.
Photo: AP
The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight.
In all, the world’s glaciers have lost more than 6.5 trillion tonnes since 2000, according to the study.
“The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be accelerating,” said William Colgan, a glaciologist for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and one of about 60 authors of the study.
Glaciers in Alaska are melting at the fastest rate of any of the 19 regions studied, losing about 61 billion tonnes of ice a year, producing the biggest net ice loss, the study found.
Central Europe’s glaciers in the past 24 years have lost the highest percentage of ice of any region, now 39 percent smaller than they were in 2000, the paper said.
Colgan said he worries most about the Alps because “elevated summer temperatures have been hammering the Alps.”
Scientists 15 years ago were worried most about the Andes and the Patagonia glaciers, but the Alps have shrunk so fast they could eventually disappear, Colgan said.
“Glaciers are apolitical and unbiased sentinels of climate change, and their decline paints a clear picture of accelerated warming,” said Gwenn Flowers, a professor of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who was not part of the study.
University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos, who also was not part of the study, said glaciers shrank and grew in the past for local, well-understood reasons that were not climate change. What is happening now is different and clear, he said.
“It’s due to greenhouse gas increases caused directly by coal, oil and natural gas burning... No amount of rhetoric, tweeting or proclamation will change that,” Scambos said.
Scambos, Flowers and other outside scientists called the assessment sobering and accurate, but not surprising.
Colgan said that many places — such as those in the west of the US — are seeing extra water now from fast-melting glaciers and benefiting from that boost, but that would soon disappear as the glaciers melt beyond a point of no return.
Melting glaciers contribute more to sea level rise than ice loss in either Greenland or Antarctica. Only the expansion of water as it warms plays a bigger role in sea level rise, the paper said.
The overall glacier loss rate is similar, if maybe slightly less, than that found by earlier and less comprehensive studies, but the new work would probably trigger new predictions that would be even gloomier in the future because of better information and worsening warming, Colgan said.
“If you’re losing 5.5 percent of the global ice volume in just over 20 years, clearly that’s not sustainable,” Colgan said. “That’s going to catch up with you.”
The 548 billion tonnes of glacier loss in 2023 “sounds incredible now, but it might sound pretty normal in 10 years from now,” Colgan said. “Mountain glaciers as a whole can flip into collective ice loss pretty darn quick.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS