By Cassandra Garrison
Nearly all of the world's glaciers are losing mass - and at an accelerated pace, according to a new study published Wednesday that could impact future projections for ice loss.
The study in the science journal Nature provides one of the most wide-ranging overviews yet of ice mass loss from about 220,000 glaciers around the world, a major source of sea level rise.
Using high-resolution imagery from NASA's Terra satellite from between 2000 and 2019, a group of international scientists found that glaciers, with the exception of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets which were excluded from the study, lost an average of 267 gigatonnes of ice per year.
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The study could fill important gaps in understanding about ice mass loss, leading to more accurate predictions, said co-author of the study Robert McNabb, a remote sensing scientist at Ulster University in the United Kingdom. Previous studies looking at individual glaciers only account for about 10% of the planet, he said.
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