World Glaciers in Crisis

More grim news from the American Advancement of Science annual meeting. According to scientists, the world’s glaciers are in crisis, from Greeenland, Patagonia, Tibet to Africa and Antarctica. They are all melting rapidly.

The amount of ice the Greenland ice sheet is loosing has doubled over the last five years.
“Fifteen years ago, we thought Greenland [glaciers] were not doing anything,” says Eric Rignot from NASA. Now, ice sheets below an elevation of 2 kilometers show “major melting,” he said. “We’re going over the edge,” he argues. Temperatures along Antartica’s peninsula are rising six times faster than the global average.

Mark Dyurgerov, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, also stipulates that over three quarters of the Earth’s freshwater is bound in ice. Because of increasing glacial melt he says: “Freshwater storage on Earth is out of balance for the first time in history.” Who knows what will happen because of it.

As Rignot from NASA says: “It’s clear, nature is having a little experiment on us.”

Forgive me for saying this, but this is one experiment that is going badly wrong.