Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000
Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.
The world’s glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annual from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week’s journal Nature.
And the last few years, the melt has accelerated even more, hitting a record 604 billion tons (548 billion metric tons) lost in 2023, the last year analyzed.
The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. In all, the world’s glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice (6.5 trillion metric tons) since 2000, according to the study.
“The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be accelerating,” said William Colgan, a glaciologist for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and one of about 60 authors of the study.
Glaciers in Alaska are melting at the fastest rate of any of the 19 regions studied, losing about 67 billion tons (61 billion metric tons) of ice a year, producing the biggest net ice loss, the study found.
In the past 24 years, Central Europe’s glaciers have lost the highest percentage of ice of any region, now 39% smaller than they were in 2000, the paper said. Colgan said he worries most about the Alps because “elevated summer temperatures have been hammering the Alps. ”
Fifteen years ago, scientists were worried most about the Andes and the Patagonia glaciers, but the Alps have shrunk so fast they could eventually disappear, Colgan said.
“Glaciers are apolitical and unbiased sentinels of climate change, and their decline paints a clear picture of accelerated warming,” said Gwenn Flowers, a professor of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who wasn’t part of the study.
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