The Juneau Icefield Is Losing 190,000 Litres Per Second
The massive icefield sits on the border of Canada and the U.S.A.
A study published in Nature Communications has reported that the Juneau Icefield is losing 50,000 gallons (190,000 litres) of water per second. The 3,900-square-kilometre icefield is composed of 1,000 glaciers on the border of Alaska and B.C.
The study said it’s shrinking 4.6 times faster than 30 years ago, noting that it lost 1.4 cubic miles (5.8 cubic kilometres) of ice per year between 2010 and 2020. “What’s happening is that as the climate is changing, we’re getting shorter winters and longer summers,” said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in England, to the Associated Press. “We’re having more melt, longer melt season.”
“It is worrisome because in the future the Arctic is going to be transformed beyond contemporary recognition,” said Julienne Stroeve, an ice scientist at the University of Manitoba. “It’s just another sign of a large transformation in all the ice components (permafrost, sea ice, land ice) that communities depend on.”
Christian Thorsberg, who covered the study for the Smithsonian Magazine, said, “Research published last year in the journal Science projects that even if global temperature rise is kept below the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold compared to pre-industrial temperatures, roughly 104,000 glaciers—or about half the world’s total—could disappear by the end of the century.”
Check out the latest buyer's guide:
