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Future ice loss captured by historical snapshots

Archival images of glacial ice on a Norwegian archipelago, together with the islands’ climatic diversity, enable application of an innovative method for making long-term projections of ice loss using short-term observations.
  1. Twila A. Moon

    1. Twila A. Moon is at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.

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Melting glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets are wreaking havoc at shorelines around the world, and there is widespread recognition of the need to understand where, when and how much ice will be lost in the future as a result of climate change. Much of what we know about Earth’s existing land ice is gleaned from rich remote-sensing records, yet relatively few of these records span more than a couple of decades — time periods that are short enough to be biased by sporadic glacier behaviour. Writing in Nature, Geyman et al.1 use observations of glaciers on the Norwegian islands that make up Svalbard to improve projections of the ice mass that is expected to be lost in this area during the twenty-first century.

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Nature 601, 325-326 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00046-1

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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