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An international research team under the coordination of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), hosted at the University of Zurich (UZH), of which our Livia Piermattei was part of, carried out the so-called Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE). The research community collected, homogenized, combined, and analyzed glacier mass changes from different field and satellite observation methods. The team then compared and combined the results from the different methods into an annual time series of glacier mass changes for all glacier regions in the world from 2000 to 2023.
The study, published on Nature, showed that in this period of time glaciers have lost about 5% of their ice globally, and regionally between 2% on the Antarctic and Subantarctic Islands and 39% in Central Europe. Annually, glaciers lost 273 billion tons – 273,000,000,000,000 kg – of ice, with an increase of 36% from the first (2000−2011) to the second (2012−2023) half of the period. Glacier mass loss is about 18% larger than the loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than twice that from the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
For more information, give a look to the full UZH media release or the scientific article itslef - The GlaMBIE team. Community estimate of global glacier mass changes from 2000 to 2023. Nature. 19 February 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08545-z
World Glacier Monitoring Service
