As Many As 10,000 Glaciers May Have Vanished Worldwide In Recent Decades; Scientists Working To Nail Down Numbers

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Scientists don’t know how many glaciers have disappeared across the world, but at least some groups have started creating inventories to get a better idea. Last year, a premier database for tracking glaciers, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS), added an “extinct layer” with a little more than 150 extinct glaciers, primarily in the United States and Europe. In August, Howe and Boyer created a Global Glacier Casualty List displaying 15 extinct and endangered glaciers around the world, including South America, Asia and India, some of which aren’t on the GLIMS map.

Andrew Fountain, a Portland State University glaciologist, started the first inventory of glaciers in the western United States and calculated that at least 400 have disappeared since the mid-20th century. Huss, who estimated that 1,000 glaciers have been lost in Switzerland alone, extrapolated that perhaps 10,000 glaciers might be lost globally. Chinese glaciologists say their country has lost more than 8,000.

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Not all ice is glacier. By definition, a glacier is essentially a moving river of ice formed from snow compaction over years. The movement flowing downhill is subtle to a person walking over it, but scientists can measure the flow with instruments, Fountain said. If a glacier becomes too small and ceases to move, it’s not a glacier anymore. In fact, the scientific label for a stagnant piece of ice is “dead.” When an entire glacier is declared dead depends on the region, with size and flow thresholds varying in different countries.

Technicalities aside, there are more obvious clues that glaciers are starting to fall apart in front of our eyes. For the past 41 years, glaciologist Mauri Pelto has visited Ice Worm Glacier in the Mount Daniel-Mount Hinman complex in Washington state every year and seen its decline firsthand. The small glacier lost mass slowly until around 2015, marked by a warm summer with relatively low snowfall. Then, starting in 2021, an unprecedented string of ice loss finally pushed the glacier over the edge. Pelto started seeing rock at the bottom, with holes in the pattern of Swiss cheese. In 2023, he declared it was no longer a glacier.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/25/dead-glaciers-melting-disappearing-ice/