Science Focus
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The world's glaciers are melting, driven to retreat by a warming trend that has persisted for well over a century. But glaciers are slow-moving bodies in more ways than one, as their huge mass of ice melts slowly, even when the temperatures rise rapidly. Since the onset of the current retreat traces back to the middle of the 19th century and the end of the Little Ice Age, it can be difficult to tell how much of recent ice dynamics is driven by recent warming.
Now, a new study has taken a close look how the world's glaciers have responded to natural and human-driven climate change. The results show that the majority of melting in the last century was still a hangover from the Little Ice Age, but a clear signal of human influence has emerged over the last few decades.
The authors of the new paper, who hail from Austria and Canada, recognize the challenge of discerning climate influences by following the behavior of glaciers. But they also suggest that there's a great opportunity in doing so. "Because glacier extent responds to changes in the glacier mass balance with a lag of decades to centuries," they write, "glaciers provide an opportunity to directly perceive long-term climate change, unobscured by interannual variability." In other words, the erratic behavior of short-term climate trends gets smoothed out by the slow adjustment of the glaciers.
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