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 …
An interesting new paper has just been published in Nature Geoscience by Romain Millan, Jeremie Mouginot, Antoine Rabatel and Mathieu Morligheim on the velocity and thickness of the world’s glaciers. They make a revised estimate of global glacier ice volume. They aren’t looking at ice in the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, just glaciers worldwide. …
The outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet are receding, calving more icebergs, and flowing faster. Further in land, the ice sheet is thinning, and there is more surface melt. The Greenland Ice Sheet is drained by outlet glaciers that flow through deep fjords to the ocean. In the image below, you can see an …
Glacier recession around the Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
