If you have not walkers across the glaciers yet, you may want to get started sometime soon. The glaciers of the world’s tallest mountains are melting faster than scientists once thought; since 2015, they have been losing nearly 300 billion tons of ice a year. If this melting point were to continue, most would be completely extinct within a hundred years, according to a new study today.
Researchers in Canada, France, Switzerland, and Norway took 20 years of satellite images taken from a special NASA satellite camera Terra. The device, called ASTER, of the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, captured 210,000 images of glaciers worldwide, each recording with two separate mirrors to create a three-dimensional image. The study did not include glaciers found in Greenland and Antarctica, which are being studied by other scientific groups.
A new study, published today in story Nature, it was estimated that between 2000 and 2004, glaciers lose 227 billion tons of ice annually. But between 2015 and 2019, these levels rose to 298 billion tons a year, prompting the authors to point to warming and rising rainfall. Taken together, the amount of water that flows into rivers and lakes represents about one-fifth of the volume of water in the last 20 years.
And the problem is not really sea level rise, although it is a serious problem, threatening the lives of residents coastal countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Panama, the Netherlands, and other parts yes Agreement Countries. In some rural areas, millions of people depend on snowshoes for their water; In years when there is not much snow, glaciers provide storage water. This is especially true in other parts of the Andes, Himalayas, and Alaska. “They provide cold water, many of them on most machines around the world,” he says Brian Menounos, professor of Earth science at the University of Northern British Columbia and co-author of the study. “Once the ice is gone, you have no power to overcome it.”
Menounos says previous research on the melting of ice sheets has not taken up a few dimensions in the atmosphere and over time, making them less aware of the amount of glaciers that were actually declining. Using a detailed satellite imagery, he says, “We were able to show that with our comparisons, we reduced the uncertainty.” To increase the amount of glacial total 211,000, it took a large computer at the University of Northern British Columbia that operates almost year-round.
The new assessment gives a warning in the future, he says Jonathan Bamber, a professor of space science at the University of Bristol who did not participate in the study. “This is a comprehensive, comprehensive, and comprehensive study of the sharpness of the global glacier in the 21st century,” he wrote in an email to WIRED. “The sheer number of results from our findings allows us to see a single glacier change for the first time around the world.”
Bamber says the analysis shows that if this trend continues, some of the low-lying areas of the mountains will be completely destroyed by the ice by 2050. “Ice is on the run, with great potential for water activities, environmental hazards, sea level rise, tourism, and employment.”
The authors agree, and Menounos said that some areas, such as Cascades and Glacier National Park, Montana, may be free of ice by the middle of the century. “See how you can,” he recommends.
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