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Satellites show world's glaciers melting faster than ever - ABC News 29 April 2021
Satellites show world's glaciers melting faster than ever
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 per cent 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.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 298 billion metric tonnes of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature.
Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study, said Alaska's melt rates are "among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 35 metres a year.
Almost all the world's glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada
Shrinking glaciers are a problem for millions of people who rely on seasonal glacial melt for daily water and rapid melting can cause deadly outbursts from glacial lakes in places like India, Mr Hugonnet said.
But the largest threat is sea level rise.
The world's oceans are already rising because warm water expands and because of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but glaciers are responsible for 21 per cent of sea level rise, more than the ice sheets, the study said.
More…
Satellites show world's glaciers melting faster than ever - ABC News
Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century | Nature (Abstract only)
OB
Satellites show world's glaciers melting faster than ever
Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 per cent 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.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 298 billion metric tonnes of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature.
Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study, said Alaska's melt rates are "among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 35 metres a year.
Almost all the world's glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada
Shrinking glaciers are a problem for millions of people who rely on seasonal glacial melt for daily water and rapid melting can cause deadly outbursts from glacial lakes in places like India, Mr Hugonnet said.
But the largest threat is sea level rise.
The world's oceans are already rising because warm water expands and because of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but glaciers are responsible for 21 per cent of sea level rise, more than the ice sheets, the study said.
More…
Satellites show world's glaciers melting faster than ever - ABC News
Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century | Nature (Abstract only)
OB
