Iceland lost 750 sq km of glaciers over the last two decades due to global warming

Iceland's glaciers have lost around 750 square kilometres (290 square miles), or seven percent of their surface, since the turn of the millennium due to global warming, a study published on Monday showed. The glaciers, which cover more than 10 percent of the country's land mass, shrank in 2019 to 10,400 square kilometres, the study in the Icelandic scientific journal Jokull said. Since 1890, the land covered by glaciers has decreased by almost 2,200 square kilometres or 18 percent.

Between 2000 and 2004, Iceland glaciers lost 227 billion tonnes of ice per year. Image credit: Flickr/On.My.BigfOot

But almost a third of this decline has occurred since 2000, according to the recent calculations by glaciologists, geologists and geophysicists.

Experts have previously warned that Iceland's glaciers are at risk of disappearing entirely by 2200.

The ice's retreat over the past two decades is almost equivalent to the total surface area of Hofsjokull, Iceland's third-biggest ice cap at 810 square kilometres.

"Glacier-area variations in Iceland since around 1890 show a clear response to variations in climate," the authors of the study wrote.

"They have been rather synchronous over the country, although surges and subglacial volcanic activity influence the position of some glacier margins," they added.

In 2014, glaciologists stripped the Okjokull glacier of its status as a glacier, a first for Iceland, after determining that it was made up of dead ice and was no longer moving as glaciers do.

Nearly all of the world's 220,000 glaciers are losing mass at an ever increasing pace, contributing to more than a fifth of global sea level rise this century, according to a study published in Nature in April.

Analysing images taken by NASA's Terra satellite, they found that between 2000-2019, the world's glaciers lost an average of 267 billion tonnes of ice each year.

The team also found that the rate of glacier melt had accelerated sharply during the same period.

Between 2000 and 2004, glaciers lost 227 billion tonnes of ice per year. But between 2015-2019, they lost an average of 298 billion tonnes each year.

The findings will be included in a forthcoming assessment report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due in 2022.



from Firstpost Tech Latest News https://ift.tt/3yUovUO

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 origins: Should we pay more attention to the lab leak theory and formally investigate it?

Image
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid first appeared at the end of 2019. So what do we know for sure, and what do we need still to find out? We know the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is close to that of bat coronaviruses . Several decades ago its “ancestor” was circulating in bat populations in southern Asia. But there are still many unanswered questions: we don’t know how the virus arrived in Wuhan, how its sequence evolved to allow human infection, and under what conditions it infected the first people who crossed its path. And for each of these stages, we don’t know whether there was a human contribution (direct or indirect). Zoonotic transmission pathways, in other words the pas
Read more

Menstrual cups are cheaper, more sustainable than pads and tampons for women

Image
Every year in America, women spend at least US$2.8 billion on sanitary pads and tampons that can take hundreds of years to decompose . Is there a more economical and environmentally friendly way? To find out, we asked Susan Powers , a professor of sustainable environmental systems at Clarkson University about her work comparing the environmental impact of tampons, sanitary pads and menstrual cups. What is a menstrual cup? A menstrual cup is a type of reusable feminine hygiene product. It’s a small, flexible bell-shaped cup made of rubber or silicone that a woman inserts into her vagina to catch and collect menstrual fluid. It can be used for up to 12 hours, after which it is removed to dispose of the fluid and cleaned. The cup is rinsed with hot water and soap between each insertion and sterilized in boiling water at least once per period. A cup can last up to 10 years . Although menstrual cups have been around for decades, they historically have been less popular than pads or ta
Read more

Human bodies respond to infections differently depending on the time of day

Image
When microorganisms – such as bacteria or viruses – infect us, our immune system jumps into action. It’s highly trained to sense and eliminate infections and clear up any damage caused by them. It’s typically assumed our immune systems work the exact same way regardless of whether an infection occurs during the day or at night. But research spanning over half a century now shows our bodies actually respond differently at day and night. The reason for this is our body clock, and the fact that each cell in the body, including our immune cells, can tell what time of day it is. Our body clock has evolved over millions of years to help us survive. Every cell in the body has a collection of proteins that indicate the time depending on their levels. Knowing whether it’s day or night means our body can adjust its functions and behaviours (such as when we want to eat) to the correct time. Our body clock does this by generating 24 hour rhythms (also termed circadian rhythms ) in how cells f
Read more