The world’s glaciers lost an astonishing amount of ice this century. A new survey published on Wednesday found that glaciers lost 273 billion tons of ice per year since 2000. A single gigaton, or one billion tons, if dropped down in a block on the National Mall in Washington, would rise 8,948 feet into the sky, or 16 times the height of the Washington Monument.
The survey, coordinated by the World Glacier Monitoring Service based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and published in Nature, found that overall the world’s glaciers lost five percent of their total mass since 2000. There are enormous regional variations here, ranging from a two percent loss up toward 40 percent. The biggest hot spots are central Europe, north Asia, and western Canada and the US. That overall total loss comes out to more than 6,500 gigatons, an amount that has contributed 18 mm to sea level rise.
And they will keep doing so, but it is the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica that will determine our eventual sea level rise fate. More notable for the glaciers is what they mean to people in the meantime. “Glaciers are vital freshwater resources, especially for local communities in Central Asia and Central Andes, where glaciers dominate runoff during warm and dry seasons,” said Inés Dussaillant, a University of Zurich glaciologist involved in the new research.
And unsurprisingly, the melt is accelerating. The pace sped up by 36 percent over the 2012 to 2023 period, compared to the preceding decade. The latest four-year period, from 2019 to 2023, was the fastest yet, averaging more than 400 billion tons of ice lost each year. In 2023, a record 548 gigatons disappeared.
When it comes to the projected future of the glaciers, humans do still have some say in the matter. If we fumble the ball badly and suffer through a “high emissions scenario,” as much as 54 percent of all glacial mass will be gone by 2100. If we manage a low-emissions world, that could be cut to 25 percent. A quarter of all the glaciers gone isn’t good, obviously, but it’s something to shoot for, given where things stand.
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