The world’s glaciers are shrinking five times faster now than they were during the 1960s. Their melt is quickening because of global warming, and adding more water to already rising seas, the study found.
Earth’s glacier is melting much quicker than scientists thought. A new study shows they are losing 369 billion tonnes of snow and ice each year, more than half of that in North America. The most far-reaching estimation of glaciers worldwide found that thousands of inland masses of snow compressed into ice are shrinking 18 percent faster than an international panel of scientists calculated in 2013.
“More than 30 years all of a sudden practically all regions began losing mass in the same time,” said lead creator Michael Zemp, executive of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich. “T“That’s clearly climate change if you look at the global picture.”
The glaciers shrinking fastest are in focal Europe, the Caucasus district, western Canada, the U.S. Lower 48 states, New Zealand and close to the tropics. Glaciers in these places on average are losing more than 1 percent of their mass each year, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature.
“In these regions, at the current glacier loss rate, the glaciers will not survive the century,” Zemp said.
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