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Ice velocity and thickness of the world’s glaciers

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 124–129 (2022)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 12 December 2022

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Abstract

The effect of climate change on water resources and sea-level rise is largely determined by the size of the ice reservoirs around the world and the ice thickness distribution, which remains uncertain. Here, we present a comprehensive high-resolution mapping of ice motion for 98% of the world’s total glacier area during the period 2017–2018. We use this mapping of glacier flow to generate an estimate of global ice volume that reconciles ice thickness distribution with glacier dynamics and surface topography. After reallocating volume connected to the Antarctic ice sheet, the results suggest that the world’s glaciers have a potential contribution to sea-level rise of 257 ± 85 mm, which is 20% less than previously estimated. At low latitudes, our findings highlight notable changes in freshwater resources, with 34% more ice in the Himalayas and 27% less ice in the tropical Andes of South America, affecting water availability for local populations. This mapping of glacier flow and thickness redefines our understanding of global ice-volume distribution and has implications for the prediction of glacier evolution around the world, since accurate representations of glacier geometry and dynamics are of prime importance to glacier modelling.

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Fig. 1: Ice velocity of the world’s glaciers.
Fig. 2: Comparison of glacier thickness distribution.
Fig. 3: Impact of the velocity-derived thicknesses on water resources.

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Data availability

Thickness and ice velocity datasets are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6096/1007. GLACIOCLIM data available at https://glacioclim.osug.fr/; GlaThiDa data available at https://www.gtn-g.ch/data_catalogue_glathida/; RGI available at https://www.glims.org/RGI/; river basins and population data available at www.worldpop.org and https://www.bafg.de.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

R.M. acknowledges support from a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). J.M. and A.R. acknowledge support from the CNES MaiSON project and Labex OSUG@2020 (Investissements d’avenir - ANR10 LABX56). M.M. acknowledges support from MEASURES‐3 project (NASA grant 80NSSC18M0083). We gratefully acknowledge CNES, ESA, Copernicus Program, NASA and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. for providing the observation used in this paper (Landsat 8, ASTER, Sentinel-1 and 2, TanDEM-X, Venµs). We thank the RGI and GlaThiDa, the Service National d’Observation GLACIOCLIM, the worldpop and BFG for the glacier basins, ice thickness, river basins and population data. The computing/storage resources (about 4 MCPU-hours and 100 Tb) used for this work were provided by high-performance clusters from GRICAD (Grenoble Alpes Recherche - Infrastructure de Calcul Intensif et de Données). Maps in Fig. 3 were created using ArcGIS software by Esri. ArcGIS and ArcMap are the intellectual property of Esri and are used herein under license. Copyright © Esri. All rights reserved. For more information about Esri software, please visit www.esri.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IRD, Grenoble INP, IGE, Grenoble, France

    Romain Millan, Jérémie Mouginot & Antoine Rabatel

  2. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen K, Denmark

    Romain Millan

  3. Department of Earth System Science, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Jérémie Mouginot & Mathieu Morlighem

  4. Department of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Mathieu Morlighem

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Contributions

R.M., J.M., A.R. and M.M. conceived and designed the research. R.M. and J.M. performed the experiments. R.M., J.M. and A.R. analysed the data. R.M., J.M., A.R. and M.M. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Romain Millan.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Leigh Stearns, Adrian Luckman and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Tom Richardson.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–13 and Tables 1–3.

Supplementary Table 4

Median value of the creep parameter A for all processed regions s−1 Pa−3.

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Millan, R., Mouginot, J., Rabatel, A. et al. Ice velocity and thickness of the world’s glaciers. Nat. Geosci. 15, 124–129 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00885-z

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