Study: glaciers are melting faster than before

Glaciers have accelerated their melting, according to a new comprehensive study. For such conclusions, the group

French experts assessed the behavior of almost all documented glaciers on the planet. They found that they lost almost 270 billion tons of ice per year in the first two decades of the 21st century.

The share of melt water accounts for about a fifthpart of the global rise in sea levels, scientists report in the journal Nature. “Over the past 20 years, glaciers have lost about 267 gigatons of water per year. If we take this volume of water and divide it over the entire territory of Ireland, then this will be enough to cover the entire country with a thickness of 3 m of water. And the overall volume loss is accelerating. It is growing by about 48 gigatons per year, ”the researchers note.

Climate change has shifted the Earth's axis

There are 217,175 glaciers in the world inventoryobjects. Some are smaller than a football pitch, others are comparable in size to a medium-sized country like the UK. Almost all of them are united by the fact that they become thinner and smaller in a changing climate, due to more intense melting in warm air.

The research team used asThe main data source is images taken by the Terra satellite, launched by NASA in 1999. They used a huge amount of computing power to interpret these images and determine the changes in height, volume and mass of glaciers up to 2019.

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