The 21st century has already seen a record-smashing decline in the world’s glaciers, which are melting at up to three times the rate of the 20th century and will continue to disappear even without further climate change, an alarming new study concludes.
Entitled Historically Unprecedented Global Glacier Decline in the Early 21st Century, the research was published Monday in the Journal of Glaciology and adds to the growing body of evidence that human-made climate change is heating the planet to unseen levels.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service, based at the University of Zurich, compared trends in the first ten years of the 21st century (2001 to 2010) with “all available earlier data from in-situ, air-borne, and satellite-borne observations as well as to reconstructions from pictorial and written sources,” according to areport summary.