Warming is Sending Mountain Glaciers Off a Cliff

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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/warming-sending-glaciers-off-cliff-21001
But while scientists could draw a line from human-caused warming to glacier loss on a global scale, attributing any one glacier’s retreat to climate change has been difficult because of relatively short records and glaciers’ large natural variations.

In a new study detailed this month in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers have figured out how to link global warming to the retreat of individual mountain glaciers. They showed that for 36 glaciers with robust records, that retreat is “categorical evidence” of climate change, study co-author Gerard Roe of the University of Washington said during a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union held last week in San Francisco.

Other research presented at the meeting also illustrated the increasingly detailed view that scientists are getting of glaciers — often situated in remote, hard-to-access areas — thanks to improvements in observational technologies. Clearer pictures of how glaciers around the world are changing helps improve predictions of how everything from local water supplies to global sea levels could be affected as the glaciers melt.``