Earth’s glaciers are melting faster than scientists thought
Posted April 8, 2019 8:05 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
WASHINGTON — A new study finds Earth’s glaciers are melting much faster than scientists thought. They are losing 369 billion tons of snow and ice each year, more than half of that in North America.
Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich, says the most comprehensive study of glaciers worldwide found that those giant masses of snow and ice have lost about 18 per cent more mass than an international panel of scientists calculated in 2013.
The world’s glaciers are shrinking five times faster now than in the 1960s, and the loss is accelerating. The melting, a result of global warming, is adding to rising sea levels, according to the study.
The study is in Monday’s journal Nature.
Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press
