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 […]
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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
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Whilst glaciers in high mountain regions represent a hazard, they can also provide a multitude of glacial resources to communities living downstream as well as further afield. Glaciers, and the mountainous regions in which they are found not only provide water and minerals in meltwater runoff, but also provide opportunities for the likes of tourism,
Written by Ethan Lee Glaciers across the tropical Andes are useful water towers for downstream communities1. During periods of drought, the melt water of these glaciers can buffer against the effects. Due to recent climate change, these glaciers are shrinking, reducing their water holding capacity2. This has massive implications in a changing world, where climate
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By Rike Becker Andean glaciers and snow fields are shrinking due to rising temperatures, but what exactly does this mean for hydrology, for future freshwater availability and water security further downstream? There is no universal answer to this question. This is particularly true when we look at the mega-diversity of Andean mountain river catchments. In
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Written by Owen King The consequences of high mountain deglaciation The loss of ice from the planet’s high mountain environments is one of the most vivid visual examples of the impact of climate change on the natural environment. Glaciers have receded and thinned, in some cases to the point of extinction, in many of Earth’s
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The Andes provide water resources to some 90 million people along their entire length. The food and water security of these people depends on the stores of water held in the snow and glacier ice in these mountains. Climate change is affecting these stores of water. Snowfall events are increasingly fewer in number, but bring
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This article was written by Camryn Kluetmeier. Rock glaciers are part of a continuum, with clean-ice glaciers at one end, debris-covered glaciers in the middle, and rock glaciers at the far end. Like glaciers, rock glaciers flow downslope, but the speed at which they flow is variable on a timescale of days, seasons and decades.
Rock glaciers are relatively small lenses of ice or frozen sediment that are covered by large amounts of seasonally frozen rock debris. The upper debris layer is known as the ‘active layer’, whilst the core of a rock glacier may comprise pure ice or large volumes of more fine-grained sediment. Rock debris is typically sourced from
