It's official glaciers will disappear within decades, after all. Telegraph
By Geoffrey Lean Environment Last updated: January 27th, 2010
Just as you may have thought it was safe to go back onto the glaciers, two new reports have come out to say that they are melting rapidly after all, indicating that many will disappear within decades.
The first, from the official World Glacier Monitoring Service, is especially relevant because the body has been at the forefront of exposing the now notorious mistakes on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It says that the almost 100 glaciers it regularly surveys around the world showed a continuation of the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades in 2007/2008, the latest year for which figures have been analysed.
Prof Wilfried Haeberli, the Services director, says: The melting goes on. He adds that it was less extreme that year than in the immediately preceding ones, but points out: Whats really important is the trend of ten years or so, and that shows an unbroken acceleration in melting.
He went on to say that, as temperatures continue to rise, many glaciers will disappear with decades. Even if global warming slowed down from its present rates in the Alps about 70 per cent will be gone by the middle of the century, and mountain ranges like the Pyrenees may be completely ice-free. Other vulnerable ranges include parts of the Andes and the Rockies.
The second study from the University of Calgary, in Canada - confirms the crisis in the Rockies, reporting that one quarter of the glacier area cover in the province of Alberta disappeared between 1985 and 2005, and predicting a further 82 per cent decline by the end of the century.Its a bit bleak for the glaciers says Dr Shawn Marshall, who led the study. Its just a matter, as the decades go on, of the ice rolling uphill until it is out of sight.
He has no doubt that man-made global warming is to blame. Some part of the 20th century story is natural, he says, but in the past 50 years theres no way to explain it from those natural changes. The sun has been in a cooling cycle. In all the worlds glaciated mountain ranges, he adds, the story is the same: widespread glacier retreat, accelerating in the last 20 years.
Prof Haeberli repeated that big glaciers at much higher altitudes, as in the Himalayas, could last centuries but added: Its centuries, not millennia, and not many centuries.
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World Glacier Monitoring Service
Preliminary glacier mass balance data 2007/2008
1 Summary of the balance year 2007/08
Preliminary mass balance values for the observation period 2007/08 have been reported now from more than 90 glaciers worldwide. The mass balance statistics (Table 1) are calculated based on all reported values as well as on the data from the 30 reference glaciers in 9 mountain ranges (Table 2) with continuous observation series back to 1980.
The average mass balance of the glaciers with available long-term observation series around the world continues to decrease, with tentative figures indicating a further thickness reduction of 0.5 metres water equivalent (m w.e.) during the hydrological year 2007/08. The new data continues the global trend in strong ice loss over the past few decades and brings the cumulative average thickness loss of the reference glaciers since 1980 at about 12 m w.e. (see Figures 1 and 2). All so far reported mass balance values, given in Table 3, are tentative.
Table 1: Overview on mass balance data 2007/08. Statistics are given for all reported glaciers (ALL) and for the available 'reference' glaciers with continuous long-term observation series (REF).
Figure 1: Mean annual mass balance of reference glaciers.
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Figure 2: Mean cumulative mass balance of all reported glaciers (black line) and the reference glaciers (red line).
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