Climate change is shrinking glaciers faster than ever, with 7 trillion tons lost since 2000

Source: AP

Updated 9:57 PM EST, February 20, 2025


Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world’s mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.

The world’s glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annual from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week’s journal Nature.

And the last few years, the melt has accelerated even more, hitting a record 604 billion tons (548 billion metric tons) lost in 2023, the last year analyzed. The study drew on an international effort that included 233 estimates of changes in glacier weight. In all, the world’s glaciers have lost more than 7 trillion tons of ice (6.5 trillion metric tons) since 2000, according to the study.

“The thing that people should be aware of and perhaps worried about is that yes, the glaciers are indeed retreating and disappearing as we said they would. The rate of that loss seems to be accelerating,” said William Colgan, a glaciologist for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and one of about 60 authors of the study.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/glaciers-melting-climate-change-ice-loss-af8ff74dbbb9aabdc537adcbc9eb6010