Glaciers are important for their beauty, cultural importance, ecosystem services such as water resources, economic value, and potential to raise global sea levels. This is an impassioned plea to recognise the value of our glaciers worldwide, and to protect them to the best of our ability. Globally shrinking glaciers Glaciers exist in pretty well every …
Globally, glaciers are receding, one of the most visual and striking pieces of evidence of the way in which climate change is affecting our planet. The evidence is clear, both in satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and repeat glacier photography. Global scale remote sensing Worldwide, glaciers are shrinking. We know this from satellite measurements, that …
Evidence of global glacier recession: repeat photographs and satellite imagery Read More »
Worldwide, glaciers are being lost. Amongst the most dramatic evidence of climatic warming is the retreat and disappearance of mountain glaciers around the world. Retreat has accelerated worldwide over the last fifty years 1 and we now face the reality of permanent loss of mountain glaciers. Where are glaciers disappearing? The extent and volume of …
Glaciated regions present a wide range of glacial resources, from drinking water to tourism and from hydroelectric power to mining. However, as the climate warms and glacial regions change, these resources are under threat, and communities will need to start adapting in order to maintain livelihoods and economic development. Glacial water resources The first of …
Introduction | Types of glacial lakes | Moraine-dammed | Ice-dammed | Bedrock-dammed | Supraglacial | Subglacial | Summary What are glacial lakes and where are they found? During the last few decades, accelerated ice mass loss and glacial retreat has resulted not only the expansion of existing glacial lakes but also the formation of new …
This article summarises the following publication: Davies, B.J., McNabb, R., Bendle, J.M., Carrivick, J.L., Ely, J.C., Holt, T., Markle, B.R., McNeil, C., Nicholson, L., Pelto, M., 2024. Accelerating glacier volume loss on Juneau Icefield driven by hypsometry and melt-accelerating feedbacks. Nature Communications 15, 5099. For a more straightforward summary of this article, go here. Summary …
Accelerating glacier volume loss on Juneau Icefield Read More »
By Alex Hyde The sub-tropical glaciers of Bhutan Bhutan is a small mountainous nation located in the Eastern Himalaya, with a population of around 727 000 people (Figure 1). The country has a sub-tropical climate in its south, where it borders lowland plains, and a Himalayan subalpine climate to the north where it meets the …
The world’s glaciers and ice sheets are changing. Observations of glacier velocity (speed of ice flow), thickness, length and area alongside measurements of climate help us to understand this change. We can monitor these changes via remote sensing (using data from sensors mounted remotely, on things like UAVs and satellites), as well as from in …
Observing and Monitoring Glaciers and Ice Sheets Read More »
This article on glacier volume change was written by Ethan Lee, from Newcastle University. Introduction Around the world, glaciers provide water for 2 billion people, however almost all glaciers are melting and shrinking reducing the amount of water available to them. We need to know how much glaciers are melting by and at what rate, …
The icefields of Alaska are dramatically thinning, resulting in a significant contribution to global sea level rise. This is partly because there is a large volume of ice in Alaska (see Millan et al., 2022), but also due to warming in this region. See all our work on Juneau Icefield here: Juneau Accelerated loss from …
