Global Warming Melts 290 Square Miles of Iceland Glacier in 20 Years

A research published on Monday found that since the turn of the millennium, Iceland's glaciers have lost roughly 750 square kilometers (290 square miles), or 7% of their surface area, owing to global warming.

According to the research published in the Icelandic scientific journal Jokull, the glaciers, which span more than 10% of the country's landmass, shrunk to 10,400 square kilometers in 2019.

Shrinking Areas

Glacier-covered terrain has shrunk by over 2,200 square kilometers, or 18 percent, since 1890.

According to current assessments by glaciologists, geologists, and geophysicists, about a third of this reduction has happened since 2000.

Total Melting

Iceland's glaciers, according to experts, are on the verge of melting totally by 2200.

During the last two decades, the ice's retreat is almost as large as Hofsjokull, Iceland's third-largest ice cap at 810 square kilometers.

The authors of the research noted, "Glacier-area fluctuations in Iceland from roughly 1890 indicate a strong response to fluctuations in climate."

"They've been quite synchronized across the nation," they noted, "but surges and subglacial volcanic activity affect the location of certain glacier borders."

After concluding that the Okjokull glacier was made up of dead ice and was no longer moving as glaciers do, glaciologists stripped it of its classification as a glacier in 2014, a first for Iceland.

Grim Possibilities

According to research published in Nature in April, nearly all of the world's 220,000 glaciers are losing mass at a rising rate, contributing to more than a fifth of global sea-level increase this century.

They discovered that between 2000 and 2019, the world's glaciers lost an average of 267 billion tons of ice every year, based on photos collected by NASA's Terra satellite.

During the same time span, the pace of glacier melt rose dramatically, according to the researchers.

Glaciers lost 227 billion tons of ice every year between 2000 and 2004. However, they lost an average of 298 billion tons a year from 2015 to 2019.

The findings will be included in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's upcoming assessment report, scheduled in 2022.

Melting Quicker

According to three-dimensional satellite assessments of all the world's alpine glaciers, glaciers are melting quicker, shedding 31% more snow and ice each year than they did 15 years ago.

Scientists determined that since 2015, the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers had lost more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow, based on 20 years of recently declassified satellite data. Each year, enough melt flows into the world's expanding oceans to submerge Switzerland by over 24 feet (7.2 meters).

Major Meltings

The United States and Canada are responsible for half of the world's ice loss.

The Columbia glacier is receding roughly 115 feet (35 meters) every year, making Alaska's melt rates "among the greatest on the globe."

Almost all of the world's glaciers are melting, even those that were once stable in Tibet. Except for a handful in Iceland and Scandinavia fed by higher precipitation, global melt rates are increasing.

Also Read: Biodiversity in Tibet's Mountainous Regions Declines as Climate Change Worsens

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Tags glacier, ice sheets, iceland, global warming