Climate change is causing glaciers to shrink around the world. Reduced meltwaters from these glaciers also have downstream effects, particularly on freshwater availability.
Climate change is causing glaciers to shrink around the world. Reduced meltwaters from these glaciers also have downstream effects, particularly on freshwater availability. A lack of meltwater can greatly restrict the water supply to many rivers, especially in arid regions such as the Andes or central Asia, that depend on this water source for agriculture. Up-to-date information on the worldwide ice volume is needed to assess how glaciers – and the freshwater reserves they supply – will develop, and how sea levels are set to change.
Ice thickness calculated for 215,000 glaciers
Led by ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, an international team of glaciologists used a combination of different numerical models to calculate the ice thickness distribution and the ice volume of some 215,000 glaciers around the world. The researchers excluded sea ice and glaciers that are connected to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from their calculations.
According to the study, the combined ice volume of all considered glaciers currently amounts to some 158,000 cubic kilometres (km3). The last available estimate – dating a few years ago – was around 18 percent higher. The largest glacier ice masses (some 75,000 km3) are found in the Arctic and account for almost half of the global glacier ice volume. They include glaciers in both the Canadian and the Russian Arctic – such as those found on Baffin Island and the Novaya Zemlya archipelago – as well as glaciers along the Greenland coast and the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Read more at ETH Zurich
Image: Arctic islands such as Spitsbergen have the largest ice volumes outside Greenland and Antarctica. (Credit: Photograph: Katrin Lindbaeck)
