Climate change, according to scientists, is hastened by humans.
Losing Mountain Glaciers
According to a report published in the journal Nature, scientists estimated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers have been losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow each year since 2015. Every year, enough melt flows into the world's growing waters to submerge Switzerland by nearly 24 feet (7.2 meters).
From 2015 to 2019, the annual melt rate was 78 billion tons (71 billion metric tons) higher than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, which are separate from the amount of water lost, have doubled in the last 20 years, according to Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France, who led the research.
The United States and Canada are responsible for half of the world's glacial melt.
Hugonnet claims that Alaska's melt rates are "among the strongest on the globe," with the Columbia glacier retreating around 115 feet (35 meters) each year.
Related Article: New Study Revealed: Earth is Losing Ice Faster than Anyone Anticipated
Global Glacier Conditions
According to the report, almost all of the world's glaciers are melting, including those in Tibet that were previously stable. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia fed by increased precipitation, global melt rates are rising.
Hugonnet explained that the near-uniform melting "mirrors the global rise in temperature" and is caused by coal, oil, and gas combustion. Any of the smaller glaciers are entirely melting. In Iceland, scientists, campaigners, and government officials arranged a funeral for a small glacier two years ago.
"Ten years ago, we said the glaciers were an example of climate change, but now they've become a monument to the climate crisis," said World Glacier Monitoring Service Director Michael Zemp, who wasn't involved in the report.
The research is the first to explore all of Earth's glaciers that aren't attached to ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica using 3D satellite imagery. Previous experiments have used only a small portion of the glaciers or used gravity calculations from orbit to quantify the decline of Earth's glaciers. According to Zemp, such gravity readings have wide margins of error and aren't as useful.
An Alarming Picture
According to Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, the new research paints a "alarming picture."
Rapid melting will trigger lethal outbursts from glacial lakes in areas like India, according to Hugonnet. Shrinking glaciers are a challenge for millions of people who depend on seasonal glacial melt for everyday water.
The most serious challenge, though, is rising sea levels. The world's seas are now growing due to warm water expansion and melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but glaciers, rather than ice sheets, are responsible for 21% of sea-level rise, according to the report. Longer-term, the ice sheets pose a greater danger to sea-level rise.
"As we progress into the twenty-first century, it is becoming abundantly clear that sea-level rise will be a bigger and bigger problem," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Also Read: Antarctic: Ocean's Cold at the Surface, but Scorching Deep Down
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