According to measurements conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute, the thickness of the glacier has decreased by more than 160 meters since 1998.
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Attention is usually given to the extra water’s effect on ocean levels, but the alarming part for me is that the ice caps at the poles and mountains are a temperature buffer that makes the temperature trend towards 0 (because higher temps melt ice, which takes a lot of thermal energy, and lower temperatures freeze ice, which releases a lot of thermal energy). If that ice all melts, I wonder what would happen to global temperatures without heat sinks to dump all that thermal energy into…
Beyond just the thermal mass represented by glaciers and ice sheets, the ice also has much higher albedo than sea and land. Without the white snow and ice reflecting sunlight back into space, more is absorbed by the Earth as heat.
160m in 25 years? That’s fucked.
