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All the World is a Melting Pot (of Glaciers)

  • Published: February 27th, 2012
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By Mike Lemonick

Scientists who study climate change know that the massive ice sheets atop Antarctica and Greenland are now the biggest drivers of sea level rise. In Greenland, especially, the ice is both melting and falling into the ocean at an unprecedented rate.

But there’s also plenty of ice in mountain glaciers around the world, and they’re melting. We wrote last week about a new survey by the NASA’s GRACE satellite about just how much they’re adding to the rising sea. Now NASA has put together a movie that lets you zoom around the Earth to visit the places where it’s happening fastest, including Alaska, Canada and Patagonia. The blue areas on the globe represent areas with greatest ice loss, while the yellow dots stand for individual glaciers (some of which, as you’ll see, aren’t melting all that much).

 

Comments

By Andrew (Ottawa, ON)
on February 27th, 2012

This is great but it would be nice to have it qualified a bit (in the video, not the text and hyperlinks): how are most people supposed to put those numbers into perspective? It seems like an enormous amount of ice melt, but it would be great to combine it with a bigger sense of what those numbers might mean.

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