Study: Planet's Mountain Glaciers Have Lost 5% Of Their Mass Since 2000
The world's glaciers are melting faster than ever recorded under the impact of climate change, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date. Mountain glaciers - frozen rivers of ice – act as a freshwater resource for millions of people worldwide and lock up enough water to raise global sea-levels by 32cm (13in) if they melted entirely.
But since the turn of the century, they have lost more than 6,500 billion tonnes – or 5% – of their ice. And the pace of melting is increasing. Over the past decade or so, glacier losses were more than a third higher than during the period 2000-2011.
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Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers outside the major ice-sheets of Greenland and Antarctica lost around 270 billion tonnes of ice a year on average. These numbers aren't easy to get your head around. So Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and lead author of the study, uses an analogy.
The 270 billion tonnes of ice lost in a single year "corresponds to the [water] consumption of the entire global population in 30 years, assuming 3 litres per person and day", he told BBC News. The rate of change in some regions has been particularly extreme. Central Europe, for example, has lost 39% of its glacier ice in little over 20 years.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4ly8vde85o