World glaciers melt faster than ever recorded

World glaciers are melting faster than ever, recorded under the influence of climate change, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date.

Mountain glaciers – frozen ice rivers – act as a freshwater resource for millions of people around the world and lock enough water to increase global marine levels by 32 cm (13 inches) if they are completely melted.

But since the beginning of the century, they have lost more than 6,500 billion tonnes – or 5% – from their ice.

And the melting rate is increasing. In the last decade, glaciers losses were more than one-third higher than in the period 2000-2011.

The study combines more than 230 regional estimates from 35 research teams around the world, which makes scientists even more confident about how quickly glaciers melt and how they will develop in the future.

Glaciers are excellent indicators of climate change.

In a stable climate, they remain approximately the same size, earning about as much ice through snowfall as they lose by melting.

But glaciers have shrunk almost everywhere in the last 20 years, as temperatures have increased due to human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels.

Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers outside the main ice sheets from Greenland and Antarctica lost an average of about 270 billion tonnes of ice a year.

These numbers are not easy to tax with your head. Thus, Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and a leading author of the study, uses an analogy.

270 billion tonnes of ice lost in one year “corresponds to (water) consumption of the entire global population in 30 years, taking 3 liters per person and day,” he told BBC News.

The degree of change in some regions is especially extreme. Central Europe, for example, has lost 39% of its glacial ice in just over 20 years.

The novelty of this study, Posted in Nature MagazineIt is not so much to find that glaciers melt faster and faster -we already knew that. Instead, its power is to collect evidence from the entire research community.

There are different ways to evaluate how glaciers change, from the field measurements to different types of satellite data. Everyone has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Direct measurements of glaciers, for example, provide very detailed information, but are only available to a small part of over 200,000 glaciers worldwide.

By systematically combining these different approaches, scientists can be much more secure in what is happening.

These evaluations of the Community “are vital because they give people confidence to take advantage of their discoveries,” said Andy Shepherd, Head of the Department of Geography and Environment at Northumbria University, who was not the author of a recent study.

“This includes other climate scientists, governments and industry, plus, of course, that anyone concerned about the impact of global warming.”

The glaciers take time to fully respond to the changing climate – depending on their size, everywhere between a few years and many decades.

This means that they will continue to melt in the coming years.

But most importantly, the amount of ice lost by the end of the century will greatly depend on how much humanity continues to warm the planet by releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This may be the difference between the loss of a quarter of the glitter glacier in the world if global climatic goals are met and almost half if warming continues uncontrolled, the study studies.

“Every tenth of the degree of warming we can avoid will save some glaciers and save us from a lot of damage,” explained Prof. Zemp.

These consequences go beyond local changes to landscapes and ecosystems – or “what is happening on the glacier does not remain there,” as Prof. Zep says.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely to some extent seasonal melted glaciers, which act as giant tanks to help buffer populations from land. When the glaciers disappear and their supply of water.

And there are global consequences. Even at first glance, small increases in the global sea level-from mountain glaciers, the main ice sheets for Greenland and Antarctica and warmer ocean waters, occupying more space-they can significantly increase the frequency of floods on the coast.

“Every inch of rising sea levels exposes 2 million more people to a year on our planet,” said Prof. Shepherd.

Global marine levels have already grown by more than 20 cm (8 inches) since 1900, with about half of it coming from the early 1990s and faster increases are expected in the coming decades.