Glaciers Losing 31% More Ice Each Year Than 15 Years Ago, Satellite Data Shows

Glaciers on our planet are melting at a much faster rate than they were before, losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than we did nearly 15 years ago. This was revealed by 3D satellite measurement data of all the mountain glaciers around the world.?

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Scientists have used 20 years of recently declassified data to come to the conclusion that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing over 328 billion tonnes of ice and snow each year since the year 2015. To put this into perspective, this is enough melt flowing into the already rousing ocean to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet of water every year.?

Researchers have blamed climate change for this. They found that the annual melt rate from the year 2015 to 2019 is roughly 78 billion more tons every year than it was from the years 2000 to 2004. The global thinnings rate has also doubled in the last 20 years.?

Half of the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States of America and Canada, with Alaska’s melt rates being one of the highest. The Columbia glacier retreats around 115 feet every year, according to Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France, who led the study.?

Trift Glacier, Switzerland: James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey

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The study (published in the journal Nature) found that glaciers that were once believed to be the most stable -- like glaciers in Tibet -- have also now started melting.?

This study was the first of its kind to use 3D satellite imagery to observe aloof Earth’s glaciers whereas earlier studies have stuck to using only a fraction of the glaciers or estimated loss of Earth’s glaciers based on gravity measurements from the orbit. Both the dated methods possessed high margins of error.?

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World Glacier Monitoring Service Director Michael Zemp in a conversation with AP, who wasn’t part of the study, said, “Ten years ago, we were saying that the glaciers are the indicator of climate change, but now actually they’ve become a memorial of the climate crisis.”