This section of the website highlights how glaciers interact with climate, and how changing climate is changing glaciers around the world today.
Globally, glaciers are receding and shrinking in response to atmospheric warming. The signal is remarkably consistent across different continents and mountain ranges. Glaciers are a critical water resource in many mountain regions of the world. providing a dependable water supply to downstream regions.
99% of Antarctica is ice-covered, and so most of the glaciers and ice streams here end in the ocean. It is in these oceanic margins that we see the most rapid changes: ice stream acceleration, thinning and grounding line migration. At the ice-ocean interface, the ice sheet is vulnerable to melting from below as well as from above, as warm ocean currents penetrate the continental shelf and melt the ice sheets at their grounding line.
This section of the website contains lots of information about how ice sheets interact with the ocean. For more information, please do see:
What a great website! So many excellent resources for helping those of us with less in-depth knowledge than the authors make sense of a sometimes confusing field but one of huge importance to understanding our past and reckoning with our future. Thank you for sharing your expertise.