Mountain Glaciers are Shrinking Due to Climate Change, And That's Bad News
News 18Mountain glaciers shrinking due to climate change are less voluminous than previously understood, putting millions who depend on them for water supply at risk, researchers reported Monday. “We generally think about glaciers as solid ice that may melt in summer, but ice actually flows like thick syrup under its own weight,” said Morlighem. “Using satellite imagery, we are able to track the motion of these glaciers from space at the global scale.” To create an ice flow database, the researchers studied more than 800,000 pairs of before-and-after satellite images of glaciers, including large ice caps, narrow alpine glaciers, slow valley glaciers and fast tidewater glaciers. “Because there is less ice stored in the world’s glaciers than we had thought they will disappear earlier than expected, and so the communities that depend on their ice and water will experience the worst effects of climate change sooner,” said Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.