Study Claims Two-Thirds of World’s Glaciers Could Disappear by 2100
The sun sets through a hole melted in an iceberg floating in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday Aug. 1, 2017.
James TweedieA new study has predicted that two-thirds of the world’s glaciers could disappear by the end of the century thanks to global warming.The article, published in the journal Science on Thursday, gave a best-case scenario of half of all the 215,000 inland glaciers melting by 2100, with five out of six doomed at the extreme end of the scale. The consequent release of between 38.7 trillion and 64.4 trillion metric tons of fresh water would see global sea levels rise by between 90 and 166 millimetres, meaning 10 million more people would find their homes by the high-tide line. 
Science & TechNever-Before-Seen Microbes Trapped in Glaciers Could Spark New Pandemic if Released3 July 2022, 12:29 GMTHowever, the study’s predictions do not apply to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, by far the two largest bodies of land-locked ice on Earth. Between them they contain some 33 million cubic kilometres of ice, about two-thirds of the world’s fresh water. The study’s lead author David Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said it was just a matter of how many glaciers would melt away — and that was mankind’s choice. “No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” Rounce said. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.” Rounce said the world was facing an average temperature rise of 2.7-degree Celsius since pre-industrial times, 250 years ago. Co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway, also blamed man-made climate change for the predicted deluge.
“For many small glaciers it is too late,” Hock said. “However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”
