The Franz Josef glacier on New Zealand's west coast has been rapidly retreating over the last 10 years. This timelapse clip captures its motion and the retreating position/ablation of its terminus.
Arapahoe Glacier Retreat
Arapahoe Glacier is the largest glacier in the state of Colorado. It sits in a cirque, a bowl-shaped, glacially carved feature high in the Rocky Mountains, and its yearly melt supplies water to the city of Boulder, home of the Geological Society of America. The glacier was first photographed in 1898 and over the 20th century it is thought to have lost over 50% of its areal extent, with most of the retreat recorded after 1960 as warming rates increased. The arrow marks the same spot on the mountain in each shot. Today the glacier’s maximum thickness is down to about 15 meters, less than half of what it was when the first photo in this sequence was taken. At current rates it will likely melt away completely this century, removing a regular source of water for the city below during summer months.
-JBB
Image credit: NSIDC http://nsidc.org/arc/adopt-a-glacier/arapaho.html
Source: facebook.com
Glaciers around the world are retreating at unprecedented rates as temperatures rise due to anthropogenic climate change. The Blomstrandbreen glacier, located in the Svalbard Archipelago (595km north of Norway), is no different.
Blomstrandbreen glacier has retreated over two kilometres since 1928, the year in which this sepia coloured photo was taken. Since the 1960s, the rate of the retreat has accelerated to 35m/year and has increased even further in the last decade.
Often, these numerical depictions of change don’t evoke the sense of enormity that they represent. But pictures speak a thousand words. In 2002, Christian Aslund took this colour image of Blomstrandbreen glacier mimicking the positioning of the original 1928 image- the shocking difference speaks for itself.
During the time between the two sets of photos, the Earth’s atmosphere had warmed by a little less than 1° C (1.8° F), and the oceans had in turn risen by about 15 centimetres - a testament to how small changes in global temperatures can have catastrophic consequences both locally and globally. The unprecedented rate of glacial melt is a canary in a coal mine and unfortunately that canary stopped chirping years ago.
-Jean
See the original Greenpeace press release here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/glaciers-melt-before-our-eyes/
Source: facebook.com
This is the current terminus of the Mendenhall Glacier, a large valley glacier near Juneau, Alaska. As recently as the early 1990s, the glacier ended where this video was taken. A few decades earlier, literally everything you see in this clip, from rock wall to rock wall, was completely covered by this glacier.