First Global Comparison of Glacier Mass Change: They’re All Melting, and Fast
By Veronika Meduna, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: ...New Zealand glaciologists...surveys, which have been running since 1977, show that summer melt now far exceeds winter snowfall and “we’re seeing the glaciers’ terminus and sides, the whole body, diminishing.” New Zealand has lost more than a third of its glacial ice and the archipelago ranks third globally—after central Europe and the Caucasus—in the proportion of ice lost to rising temperatures, according to findings published in Nature by the first comprehensive global Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE). ...the GlaMBIE team produced a time series of global glacial mass change between 2000 and 2023, showing that collectively, the world’s glaciers lost 5% of their total volume. “This may not seem much,” said Michael Zemp, GlaMBIE project leader and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zürich. But it means an annual global loss of 273 billion tonnes (301 billion tons) of ice. New Zealand has lost more than a third of its glacial ice and the archipelago ranks third globally—after central Europe and the Caucasus—in the proportion of ice lost to rising temperatures, according to findings published in Nature by the first comprehensive global Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE). “To put this in perspective,” Zemp said, “the ice lost each year amounts to the water intake of the entire global population in 30 years, assuming 3 liters per person a day.” ...The largest overall contribution to ice loss (22%) comes from Alaska, said Caitlyn Florentine, a research physical scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Bozeman, Mont., and a GlaMBIE member....