As global temperatures rise, mountain glaciers around the world are sweating. This could affect nearly 1.9 billion people living in and downstream of mountainous areas who depend on melting ice and snow for drinking, agriculture and hydroelectric power. In the tropical Andes, for instance, glaciers provide almost one-third of the water that millions of people in major cities use during the dry season.
A study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience shows the decline could be more calamitous than previously thought. Earth’s mountain glaciers may have less ice than previously estimated, meaning they could be tapped dry sooner than expected, especially as climate change hastens their melt.
The researchers also found the potential sea level rise contribution from the glaciers would decrease by about 20 percent from 13 to 10 inches. But since mountain glaciers contribute around only one-third of global sea level rise, this has only a modest impact on future projections.
“This study is not good news because we have less freshwater for people if we have less ice,” said Romain Millan, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral candidate at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in France. “For sea level rise, it does not change anything to the big picture” because “Greenland and Antarctica are the major drivers of sea level rise.”
In the first worldwide survey of its kind, Millan and his colleagues determined the movement and thickness of more than 250,000 mountain glaciers, which account for 98 percent of glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
“You would be surprised by how little we still know about mountain glaciers. While we know their surface area pretty well, we have direct measurements of ice thickness for less than 1 percent of the 250,000 glaciers worldwide,” Mathieu Morlighem, an author of the study and a professor at Dartmouth College, said in an email. “Their future is notoriously difficult to predict because we are still lacking basic characteristics, such as their geometry.”
For the study, researchers from France, Denmark and the United States analyzed 800,000 pairs of satellite images, including small glaciers that have never been studied, such as in New Zealand and the southern cordilleras of South America, as well as large ones in Patagonia and the Arctic. The team tracked the movement of their physical features, like crevasses, over more than a year to assess their ice flow. Using the glacier’s velocity and slope, they were able to estimate the ice’s thickness and volume.
The scientists concluded global glacial ice content was lower than previously thought, but it varied by region. In the tropical Andes mountains, the researchers found nearly a quarter less glacial ice, which translates to nearly a quarter less freshwater. Extreme heat waves in the region, like the one last month, make these smaller stores of ice dwindle faster and leave even less for future generations.
“When you lose your snowpack early in the summer, [the glacier] melts a lot faster because the ice is dark, so it strips volume away quicker,” said Pelto, who was not involved in the new study.
Mountain glaciers in other locations, researchers found, had more ice than previously estimated. The Himalayan glaciers have 37 percent more ice, the researchers estimate, but some of these ice fields are under intense pressure as temperatures rise.