An alarming acceleration in the melting of glaciers around the world.

The swift retreat of these great ice streams is helping to raise ocean levels and is threatening significant changes in human, animal, and plant life—some good, but mostly bad.

Like a canary in a coal mine, the dwindling of the glaciers is visible evidence that the earth really is getting hotter.

Most of Earth’s 160,000 glaciers have been slowly shrinking and thinning for more than a century as the climate warms up from both natural causes and human activity.

But scientists say the melt rate has accelerated dramatically since the mid-1990s, which was the hottest decade in a thousand years, according to data from ancient ice cores and tree rings.

“As the Peruvian ice fields disappear, sources of irrigation and hydroelectric power will dry up,” he said. Other consequences include a more rapid rise in sea levels, speeding the flooding or even destruction of low-lying islands and coastal areas.

Glaciers are shrinking not only in area but also in thickness. In Alaska, they are losing an average of 6 feet (1.8 meters) of thickness a year, Anthony Arendt, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, reported last month in the journal Science. That’s more than twice the annual rate observed from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.

By the middle of this century, the Rockies, the Cascades, and Glacier National Park will have lost almost all their ice, Kargel predicted.

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Madhusudan Lal
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