There are 273 billion tons of ice lost from 2000 to today Only in continental glaciersexcluding the Arctic and Antarctica, the equivalent of 30 years of water consumption by the entire world population.
This is what emerges from international work coordinated by World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) Published in the magazine Nature and conducted by scientists from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Zurich, which have detected as so far – in this century – the glaciers have lost about 5% of their total volume.
Furthermore, regional losses were very variable: the Antarctic and Subantartiche islands, for example, lost 2% of their volume.
The study
According to research data, such a dissolution is leading to a greater loss of regional resources of freshwater and a Raise of global sea levels at increasing pace.
Separated from the continental glacial caps in Greenland and Antarctica, in 2000 the glaciers covered more than 705 thousand square kilometers and contained 121,728 billion tons of ice on a global level.
Since then, the glaciers have lost about the 5% of their surface globally and, at the regional level, between 2% in the Antarctic and Subantartiche Islands and the 39% in Central Europe.
The loss of glaciers, of course, also leads to an exhaustion of the regional fresh water reserves for remote communities and for those who already face the scarcity of water.
About 2 billion people depend on the water of the glaciers and therefore their retreat is a big problem for the company-said Noel Gourmelen, the main co-author of the study. It is not just that we are losing them from our landscape, they are an important part of our daily life.
