April 29, 2021

Anna Murray 

The article "Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century" was published on April 28 in the science journal Nature. The leading French author Romain Hugonnet from Universite de Toulouse associated with other scientists discovered almost 220,000 of the world’s regional glaciers similar to Greenland and Antarctic glaciers have been diminishing rapidly at a vast global scale. The accelerated glaciers melting disordered regional hydrology and submerged global sea level, resulting in consistent deteriorating natural hazards.

In accordance with satellite data since the early twenty-first century analyzed by Hugonnet and other co-authors, the contrasting phenomena have demonstrated geographic patterns of accelerated glacier mass loss. Their source image availability at 100-meter spatial resolution included time series in 5, 10, and 20 years of global, regional, tile, and per-glacier elevation and mass change, elevation change maps.

After studying the high-resolution imagery taken from NASA's Terra satellite between 2000 and 2019, the world’s glaciers decreased an annual average of 267 billion tons, from 227 in the 2000s to 298 after 2015, of ice. Although Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were excluded in the study, the accelerated melting glaciers were observed by annual rising sea levels by 0.74 millimeters or 21% losses.

Researchers indicated the glaciers in Alaska, Iceland, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Pamir Mountains were most affected by the fastest melting losses where ice has been melting for decades. In addition, half of the sea levels in North America were impacted. The world's shrinking glaciers and ice sheets are apparent evidence of global warming driven by climate change.

Photo:webshot.