Abstract
Have you ever watched an ice cube melt on a hot day? Well, that’s happening to glaciers all over the world. Glaciers have important impacts on water resources, runoff, and sea level rise. Keeping track of how glaciers change is important to predict and plan for these downstream impacts.
We wanted to create a more recent record of how glaciers have changed from 2000 to 2023. So we compared and combined data about glaciers collected using different methods. We found that glaciers worldwide lost about 5% of their mass in this period. In different regions glaciers lost between 2% and 39% of their mass. We saw slight differences between data collection methods that could add up over time. We expect glacier loss to continue, which will lead to some regions losing their glaciers by 2100. It’s important to use the most accurate and up-to-date information to make predictions about glacier loss in the future.
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