Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Half of the Earth’s glaciers, particularly smaller ones, will be disappeared by the end of this century due to climate change, but reducing global warming may save other glaciers, according to a new study.
The research, released on Thursday in the journal Science, offers the most comprehensive review of what the 215,000 glaciers on Earth will look like in the future. It is crucial to control greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the consequences of glacier melt, such as sea level rise and the depletion of water resources.
The study examined the effects of four scenarios where the global mean temperature changes by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), 2.0 degrees Celsius (C), 3.0 degrees Celsius (C), and 4.0 degrees Celsius.
According to Regine Hock, a co-author of a study from the University of Oslo and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, “every degree increase creates greater melt and loss.” Hock told AFP that lowering the temperature rise can also reduce mass loss. “So, in that sense, there is also some hope,” said the speaker.
The researchers predicted that 49 percent of the world’s glaciers would disappear by 2100, even if global temperature rise is kept to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the most ambitious aim of the Paris Agreement. Since the smaller glaciers would be affected first, that would equal around 26% of the total mass of all glaciers on Earth.
According to current estimates, the average world temperature is rising by 2.7C, which would cause the glaciers in Central Europe, Western Canada, the continental United States, and New Zealand almost entirely disappear.
According to Hock, regions with very little ice, such as the western US, the Caucasus, the Andes, or the European Alps, had virtually all of their ice by the end of the century. Therefore, the glaciers are essentially doomed.
Giant glaciers like those in Alaska would be more impacted by the worst-case scenario, which calls for an increase in global temperature of 4.0C, and 83 percent of glaciers will vanish by the end of the century. Sea level rise would be made worse by the loss of glaciers.
Compared to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the glaciers we are investigating makeup barely 1% of all the ice on Earth, according to Hock. She said, “But they have contributed to sea level rises almost as much as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets in the last three decades.”
World glaciers’ disappearance to impact water resources
Glaciers’ disappearance will also impact water resources because they provide fresh water for some two billion people. “The glaciers compensate for the water loss in summer when it’s hot and not raining much,” Hock said.
The study’s estimates, which are bleaker than those of UN climate experts, were made using computer simulations and observations of the mass of each glacier over time.
Despite the troubling findings, Hock asserted that “human effort can mitigate the mass loss. She remarked, “If it happens is, obviously, another question, and it is, of course, up to the decision-makers whether that occurs.
