Climate Change: The Glaciers Worldwide Are Melting At An Accelerating Rate
According to the new comprehensive research, the glaciers around the world are melting at an alarming rate.
A French-led team has recently assessed the behavior of almost all documented ice sources and streams all over the planet.
The research is showing that almost 270 million tones of ice are lost every year in the recent decades of the 21st century. The melted water is the reason for about a fifth of the global sea-level rise. It has been told by the scientist to the nature journal.
Team member Robert McNabb, from the universities of Ulster and Oslo, is using an analogy to explain the involved numbers since it is quite hard to imagine.
Mr. McNabb said, “Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen that glaciers have lost about 267 gigatonnes (Gt) per year. So, if we take that amount of water and we divide it up across the island of Ireland, that’s enough to cover all of Ireland in 3m of water each year”, in the latest edition of Science in Action.
He further added, “And the total loss is accelerating. It’s growing by about 48Gt/yr, per decade.”
In the worldwide inventory of glaciers, there are a total of 217,175 ice streams scattered in different countries.
The glaciers differ in size very much according to their altitude and location. Some of them are smaller than a football ground and some can stretch up to the size of a country like the UK.
The common factor in all of them is the current condition. The glaciers are thinning out constantly decaying for the climate change. Since the pattern of snowfall has shifted, the glaciers are melting exponentially in the presence of warmer air but not getting time to solidify or freeze again.
Research team leader Romain Hugonnet, from the University of Toulouse in France, took the help of the imagery acquired by Nasa’s Terra satellite as a primary source of data.
The satellite was launched in 1999 and helped to interpret the glacier’s volume, mass, and elevation up to 2019 with immense computing technology.
Co-author Matthias Huss from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, said, “This new study is a major advance as we get a high spatial resolution and, at the same time, it also provides the temporal change over the two decades directly based on satellite data, which is novel.”
He further added, “This data-set has been validated with an immense amount of additional, independent measurements and is highly accurate so that the uncertainties of previous studies are strongly reduced.”
Andy Shepherd, professor of Leeds University, said in a statement, “Glacier melting accounts for a quarter of Earth’s ice loss over the satellite era, and the changes taking place are disrupting water supplies for billions of people downstream – especially in years of drought when meltwater becomes a critical source.”
The future sea-level rise will be the primary concern until we start taking care of nature.
Glenda Bozeman – Business and Services
Glenda Bozeman writes Business articles for industries that want to see their Google search rankings surge. Her articles have appeared in a number of sites. Her articles focus on enlightening with informative Services sector needs. She holds the degree of Masters in Business and Marketing. Before she started writing, she experimented with various professions: computer programming, assistant marker, and others. But her favorite job is writing that she is now doing full-time.
