Speed at which world's glaciers are melting has doubled in 20 years
Related: Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century (Nature)
Also: Satellites show world’s glaciers melting faster than ever (Associated Press)
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Source: The Guardian
Speed at which world’s glaciers are melting has doubled in 20 years
Glacier melt contributing more to sea-level rise than loss of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, say experts
Jonathan Watts and Niko Kommenda
Wed 28 Apr 2021 16.00 BST
The melting of the world’s glaciers has nearly doubled in speed over the past 20 years and contributes more to sea-level rise than either the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, according to the most comprehensive global study of ice rivers ever undertaken.
Scientists say human-driven global heating is behind the accelerating loss of high-altitude and high-latitude glaciers, which will affect coastal regions across the planet and create boom-and-bust flows of meltwater for the hundreds of millions of people who live downstream of these “natural water towers”.
Between 2000 and 2019, glaciers lost 267 gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year, equivalent to 21% of sea-level rise, reveals a paper published in Nature. The authors said the mass loss was equivalent to submerging the surface of England under 2 metres of water every year.
This was 47% higher than the contribution of the melting ice sheet in Greenland and more than twice that from the ice sheet in Antarctica. As a cause of sea-level rise, glacier loss was second only to thermal expansion, which is prompted by higher ocean temperatures.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/28/speed-at-which-worlds-glaciers-are-melting-has-doubled-in-20-years
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Source: Associated Press
Satellites show world’s glaciers melting faster than ever
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
April 28, 2021
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Scientists blame human-caused climate change.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.
The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,” said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.
Half the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/mountains-climate-climate-change-oceans-glaciers-64abe6a2ebb9793d8d695735128284ef
