Glaciers continue to shrink, ice sheets at risk in the long term

Over the weekend, Nature Geoscience released two papers that provide some perspective on the changes that are likely to take place as our planet continues to warm. One took advantage of an expanded catalog of glacier measurements to track how they would respond to the changes by the end of this century, and shows continued losses, with a peak rate in the 2040s. The second takes a longer-term view, tracking the effects of our current emission trajectory out to the year 3000. That study suggests that, even were we to cease all carbon emissions by 2100, it will take the planet hundreds of years to reach a new equilibrium, and that the process of doing so could drive some radical changes.

First, the glaciers. In response to the rapid shrinking of glaciers, researchers around the world have upped their monitoring of ice loss, leading to data set that tracks changes in 120,000 glaciers. The authors created an elevation-dependent mass-balance model of glacial response to temperatures, and then calibrated it using historic data from these glaciers. They then ran the model forward to 2100, using temperatures derived from an ensemble of 10 different climate models, using a mid-range scenario for the trajectory of future carbon emissions.

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