Global warming is melting the world’s glaciers at an alarming rate
Live MintIt is no secret that the immediate physical effects of global heating is being observed in the way that it is melting the world’s ice, or cryosphere. A new study published in Nature on 28 April has now found that between 2000-2019, the world’s glaciers, including those in the Himalaya, lost 267 gigatonnes of ice every year. This rate of melting has contributed towards 21% of global sea level rise, more than the contribution of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Global glacial mass loss in the two decades has been 47% larger than the Greenland ice sheet and over twice as much as the Antarctic ice sheet. The researchers found that outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, glaciers around the world have been losing mass at a rapidly accelerated pace of 62Gt per year per decade.